The effect of human emotional states has been little investigated in the past. Recent research indicates that emotional responses to various stimuli may influence a broad range of human behavior including communication. Severe limitations in the effort investigate these effects has been caused by the lack of a theoretical frame of appropriate methodologies. / A solution to this problem has been recently offered by Mehrabian. Within this theory, all human emotion is conceptualized as being composed of various combinations of pleasure, arousal, and dominance. Combinations of these three dimensions are systematically related to a set of behaviors that can be broadly classed as approach-avoidance. / The function of pleasure and arousal have been investigated in previous research. The function of dominance and its relationship to the other dimensions has not been examined. It was the purpose of this study to investigate the effect of dominance on approach and the relationship of dominance to the other two dimensions. / Stimuli were constructed that elicited all possible combinations two levels, high and low, of each emotional dimension. This resulted in a 2 x 2 x 2 fully crossed factorial design. Stimuli consisted of verbal descriptions of various situations. Subjects responded by completing a dependent measure that asked five questions about desire to approach the conditions. / A manipulation check was conducted and the stimuli were found to have performed as desired. The reliability of the dependent measure was examined and found to be acceptable. Data was aggregated and results calculated using ANOVA and Scheffe tests. / Of importance were the findings that dominance was a more important dimension than previously thought. Dominance accounted a significant proportion of variance. The conceptualization of dominance as a permission state seems to be supported. A significant interaction between dominance and pleasure was also observed. The finding that dominance and arousal do not interact has led to the speculation that dominance and arousal are additive when predicting approach. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 42-11, Section: B, page: 4597. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1981.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_74704 |
| Contributors | BIGGERS, JAMES THOMPSON, II., Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 195 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
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