CROSS CULTURAL VALIDATION OF THE IAPS 1 Running Head: CROSS CULTURAL VALIDATION OF THE IAPS The international affective picture system: a cross cultural validation study

In this study normative ratings of the International Affective Picture System (IAPS, Center for the Study of Emotion and Attention [CSEA], 1995) were compared with the ratings from a Flemish sample. Eighty Flemish first-year psychology students from the Ghent University (Belgium) rated valence, dominance and arousal for a stratified sample of 60 pictures that was selected from the IAPS. Reliability coefficients indicate that the self-report ratings are internally consistent. There are four findings that converge upon the thesis that the ratings from the Flemish sample are similar to the normative ratings. First, the affective ratings from our sample correlated strongly with the North American ratings: .948, .837 and .868, respectively for valence, arousal and dominance. Second, mean valence and arousal ratings did not differ significantly between the Flemish and the North American sample. Furthermore, plotting of the Flemish valence and arousal ratings results in a similar boomerang shaped distribution as the North American affective ratings. And finally, as expected, the association between valence and arousal is more pronounced in unpleasant pictures. CROSS CULTURAL VALIDATION OF THE IAPS 3