Quote Originally Posted by Bulldog Psion View Post
One thing I'm interested in is the source of the photos. Are these people pretending to have the given emotion, or are these actual photos of people whose mood was somehow later identifiable but who were reacting naturally to something at the time, and didn't know their pictures would be used for this purpose?

If they're acting for it, I can see that as skewing the results upward because of the natural tendency to exaggerate the emotional signals when you're pretending. "Hamming it up" for the camera, in effect.
They were from magazines. Not sure of veracity.

Quote Originally Posted by (Un)Inspired View Post
30/36 I'm not sure I was scored correctly however.

How do I know that the people who wrote the test and I have the same definitions for words like aroused and irritated? If we don't have shared definitions then how can we be in agreement or disagreement over what someone is expressing?
This is a reoccurring issue for you isn't it? :(
Definitions are descriptive, not prescriptive. The words aren't decided in vacuum; there's a multi decade inertia behind the social context of most of those, based not on what someone arbitrarily decided to an emotion should be, but based on naming an existing, discrete, objective phenomenon. You can trust, at least, that arousal is universal, even if the learned expressions for conveying it are aubjective.