Creating and testing the effectiveness of hypothetical scenarios which elicit anger and hurt in romantic relational contexts

Abstract

Researchers interested in emotions and romantic relationships have long been struggling to find efficient and reliable emotion elicitation techniques. In this article, we present the work of creating and testing the effectiveness of hypothetical scenarios that elicit anger and hurt in romantic relational contexts. In study one, two hypothetical scenarios for each emotion were created using the most frequent categories of recalled affective events. Further on, we tested their effectiveness in eliciting anger or hurt in three different phases. In study two, 337 participants, aged between 18 and 40 (M = 19.93; SD = 3.17), read the scenarios and rated them according to several criteria such as arousal, discreteness, positive and negative induced affectivity. We found that our hypothetical scenarios were effective on discreteness, arousal, and positive and negative affect for eliciting anger and hurt in the contexts of romantic relationships.