Development of Turkish Self-Reported Discrete Emotions Scale - Pilot 1
Creators: name: Taşfiliz, Duygu
name: Terzi, Hilal
Publisher: name: Open Science Framework
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: Social and Behavioral Sciences
subject: Psychology
subject: FOS: Psychology
subject: discrete emotions
subject: scale development

description: Although emotions are an essential part of daily life, the naming of emotional experiences can vary from culture to culture and even person to person. Nevertheless, there is not a comprehensive discrete emotions scale developed in Turkish to our knowledge. This study aims to determine the most used emotion words and expressions that best express emotional experiences in Turkish and develop the Turkish Self-Reported Discrete Emotions Scale. To this end, we first looked into previous research and theories on discrete emotions. We looked at the emotion categories which have been developed based on discrete emotion theories. We discovered three recent questionnaires as a result of our investigation, namely the modified Differential Emotions Scale (mDES; Catalino, Algoe, &amp; Fredrickson, 2014), the Discrete Emotions Questionnaire (DEQ; Harmon-Jones, Bastian, &amp; Harmon-Jones, 2018), and the Distinct Affective States Questionnaire (DAS; Chung, Harari, &amp; Denissen, 2021), one video-based research which identified self-report 27 distinct categories of emotion (Cowen &amp; Keltner, 2017), and a meta-analysis of existing self-report measures of distinct emotions (Weidman, Steckler,&amp; Tracy, 2016). We took these studies as a basis because most of the scales and major theories previously developed on emotions were prepared in English, yet there are no Turkish resources. Summary of those studies: Catalino, Algoe, &amp; Fredrickson, 2014; mDES: 20 emotion categories, 60 emotion terms (3 for each) Harmon-Jones, Bastian, &amp; Harmon-Jones, 2018; DEQ: 8 emotions, 24 emotion terms (4 for each) Chung, Harari, &amp; Denissen, 2021; DAS: 6 emotion family, 26 emotion categories, 95 items (4 for 18, 3 for 7, 2 for 1) Cowen &amp; Keltner, 2017: 27 emotion categories Weidman, Steckler,&amp; Tracy, 2016: 66 emotions Since some of those emotion categories were overlapping (e.g., “aesthetic appreciation” from the initial list overlaps with other emotion categories such as “awe” and “admiration”) and some of them are synonyms for each other (i.e., empathic pain and sympathy, desire and craving), we combined or eliminated some of them. In addition, we discarded some emotions because there is no exact Turkish correspondence of those, but we can get the sense of the meaning from some other emotion categories (i. e., elevation). We also added some additional emotion terms that could be considered a state and emotions (i.e., exclusion, loneliness, and trust). Our final list consisted of 56 emotions, and we created one story for each. Example stories: Anxiety: “Dear Diary, I will make a presentation for the first time in a class tomorrow. Even thinking about it gets me into a lather, and dries out my throat. I don't know what to do if I forget what to say or if something irrelevant comes out of my mouth.” Awe: “Magnificent! In a word, magnificent. I was speechless at the expanse of space when I saw the new color images from the Hubble Space Telescope.” Boredom: “Dear Diary, Today is September 19. If I keep staring blankly at these walls for a few more days, I'm going to explode. I certainly don't think I can bear to stay within these four walls any longer. Wish there was a decent internet connection at least!.” Excitement: “Tomorrow is one of the most important days of my life. We are connecting our lives with the person I love. I have to wake up early for preparations. Unfortunately, I won't be able to sleep tonight!” Surprise: "I didn't know what to do for a few minutes in the face of this news. I never expected something like this." Then, we conducted a pilot study to test whether our stories reflect the intended emotion categories. We prepared a survey by using Qualtrics and gave an informed consent form at the beginning. If participants agreed on participating in our research voluntarily, they saw an instruction on the next page about what is expected from them. Participants were asked to read each story and write down one emotional word or phrase that best described the emotion experienced by the person in the story. Each participant saw 20 stories randomly, and they reported their gender and age after the stories. Lastly, they asked to write if they had any comments on the survey.