Affect Grid: A Single-Item Scale of Pleasure and Arousal

This article introduces a single-item scale, the Affect Grid, designed as a quick means of assessing affect along the dimensions of pleasure-displeasure and arousal-sleepiness. The Affect Grid is potentially suitable for any study that requires judgments about affect of either a descriptive or a subjective kind. The scale was shown to have adequate reliability, convergent validity, and discriminant validity in 4 studies in which college students used the Affect Grid to describe (a) their current mood, (b) the meaning of emotion-related words, and (c) the feelings conveyed by facial expressions. Other studies are cited to illustrate the potential uses of the Affect Grid as a measure of mood.