ArticlePsychological science2018
The Emotional-Ambiguity Hypothesis: A Large-Scale Test.
Article in Psychological science, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed.
- Putting Emotional Memories in Context: The Constructionist Model of Emotional Memory.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2026Review
- The role of ambiguous valence, origin, and activation in behavioral and eye-tracking measurements during N-back task.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Unveiling the intensity-ambiguity relationships among affective and lexico-semantic variables in Chinese characters and the character-word relationships in Chinese two-character words.Behavior research methods · 2025Article
- Article
- Arousal may not be anything to get excited about.Emotion review : journal of the International Society for Research on Emotion · 2025Article
- Effects of emotional ambiguity and emotional intensity on true and false memory.Memory & cognition · 2024Article
- Decoding the essence of two-character Chinese words: Unveiling valence, arousal, concreteness, familiarity, and imageability through word norming.Behavior research methods · 2024Article
- Feelings are Messy: The Feelings We Study in Affective Science Should Be Too.Affective science · 2024Review
- The recognition effects of attribute ambiguity.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2023Article
- Memory effects of semantic attributes: A method of controlling attribute contamination.Behavior research methods · 2023Article
- Affective norms for emotional ambiguity in valence, origin, and activation spaces.Behavior research methods · 2023Article
- Normative developmental vs. reverse developmental trends in memory distortion: a framework to investigate the impact of internal and external influences on memory and their relevance to legal decisions.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Review
- The shared signal hypothesis: Facial and bodily expressions of emotion mutually inform one another.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2022Article
- Investigating the roles of age, sex, depression, and anxiety for valence and arousal ratings of words: a population-based study.BMC psychology · 2020Article
- Identifying the representational structure of affect using fMRI.Affective science · 2020Article
- A network model of affective odor perception.PloS one · 2020Article
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Abstract
Valence and arousal are core dimensions of emotion, but the relation between them has eluded scientific consensus. The emotional-ambiguity hypothesis is the first new model of this relation to appear in some years. It introduces the novel principle that the relation between valence and arousal is controlled by a variable that is not traditionally measured: the uncertainty of perceived valence. A comprehensive evaluation of this principle was conducted using publicly available emotional word and emotional picture databases. There was compelling support for the hypothesis in both types of databases and for both positive and negative valence: The strength of the relation between perceived arousal and perceived positivity or negativity decreased linearly as valence perceptions became more ambiguous. These results explain some puzzling facts about the valence-arousal relation that figure prominently in literature reviews, and they provide a solution to the problem of how to remove arousal confounds from valence effects.
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