Directrices

In search for appropriate measures of emotions for consumer behaviour, Havlena &

Holbrook (1986) state that M-R covers many facets of emotions and is therefore a preferable measure. However their study was not specific for retail concepts. They question if all of the emotions are pertinent in a shopping context, and if a shorter more appropriate measure can be found.

Plutchik (cf. Havlena & Holbrook, 1986; Plutchik, 1980) proposes eight basic emotional categories, as primary reaction to events and circumstances. It assumes that all other emotions can be traced back to one or several of these eight (fear, anger, joy, sadness, acceptance, disgust, expectancy and surprise), and while there is no final agreement if all are relevant to consumption behaviour, they have been widely applied in consumer research. The emotional categories were represented by 24 items, which are measured on a seven-position scale measuring intensity from “not at all” to “very strongly”. In a comparative study, the Plutchik scale was found to contain less information, whereas the M-R scale represented 7 of the 8 emotions of Plutchik reliably.

In a factor analysis, it was confirmed that M-R contains three P-A-D dimensions, whereas Plutchik’s scale contained three dimensions of which only the first one (positive/negative affect) was explainable (cf. Havlena & Holbrook, 1986). Because of the length of the scale, it also does not deliver any additional benefits of brevity, which could outweigh these shortcomings.

An alternative measure are the fundamental emotions described as the Differential Emotions Theory by Izard (1977), which has become increasingly popular with consumer researchers (Machleit & Eroglu, 2000). Izard (1977) postulates that emotions

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are accurately represented with 10 emotion types (joy, sadness, interest, anger, guilt, shy, disgust, contempt, surprise, fear), which can be measured by two or three items each. It contains some negative emotions (anger, or disgust due to poor interactions with salespersons) which are not included in the M-R measure but are indeed relevant for a retail setting (Machleit & Eroglu, 2000). In the initial study, respondents were asked to indicate how they feel for each of these 27 items on a 5-point scale. Coefficient alpha reliability ranged from .71 to .90 for all dimensions (Izard, 1977). A comparative study compared Izard’s scale to the one used in M-R as well as the Plutchik scale in a retail setting. Mehrabian-Russel’s scale explained much less of the variance found in each of the other two scales, than vice versa. This suggests that the M-R scale may be missing emotions relevant in retail marketing. Little difference was found between the Izard and the Plutchik scale (Machleit & Eroglu, 2000).

Including very long measurements into surveys can increase respondent fatigue, or result in a lower response rate. This is a problem with all of the above scales, and attempts have been made to reduce the number of items required to measure emotions.

Izard argues that dimensional approaches to measuring emotions are unhelpful, and promotes that 10 distinct emotions are basic and interact without being clearly allocated to a positive/negative dimension(Izard, 1977, 2007). Other studies have reduced the number of items even further while still achieving acceptable levels of computed reliability. Scales with six items each were also used, with alpha values of .88 and .77, respectively (Donovan, et al., 1994). One study used two constructs with 4 and 3 items achieving alpha scores of .72 and .64, respectively (Ridgway, et al., 1989).

For this particular study, we argue that the scale used should be 1) as short as possible, 2) easy to understand across cultures and languages, and 3) efficient in that it should measure only basic emotions, but not those which may be combinations of the basic emotions. We agree with Izard's more recent (2007) findings (which have somewhat shifted from the original model presented 30 years ago) that basic emotions should be natural emotions, i.e. those which are common to cultures because they are part of a human's DNA, and not subject to effects of learning or socialization. In being natural, they also satisfy the requirements to elicit some form of physiological reaction, such as facial expressions (Ekman, 1992). In using facial expressions, we not only reduce the number of items per emotion to one (i.e. a single facial expression), but also circumvent the problematic area of translation.

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Izard's six natural basic emotions are interest, joy/happiness, sadness, anger, disgust and fear (Izard, 2007). Others have proposed similar schemes (K. Oatley, et al., 2011).

It has been suggested to replace interest with surprise, as interest could be understood as a reaction to a novel even or circumstance, which is appraised to help achieving goals, thus causing happiness as well. Surprise is a more neutral measure and probably correlates to both positive and negative emotions, giving it more explanatory power (Westbrook, 1987). It also has been linked to distinct facial expressions, making it a more reliable measure across cultures (Ekman, Sorenson, & Friesen, 1969). Several studies replace fear with anxiety which is possibly a weaker type of emotion, and thus more likely to pick up emotional states which maybe have not yet reached the level of outright fear.

It has been suggested that even small changes in the environment can influence the customers’ emotions, for example a quick smile of a salesperson or having to wait too long for a doctor’s appointment (Meryl Paula Gardner, 1985). We therefore measured the state emotions of respondents by asking them to rate each of the six basic emotions:

anger, fear/anxiety, disgust, joy/happiness, sadness, surprise depending on how accurately they represent their current feeling on a sliding scale from 0 (not at all) to 100 (fully).

Figure 3: Six basic emotions (and one neutral) as displayed by KDEF pictures

source: Karolinska Directed Emotional Faces stimuli (Goeleven, De Raedt, Leyman, &

Verschuere, 2008, p. 1097)

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The set of detailed measures will be presented and discussed in section V.4.4. We present an overview and definition in Figure 3. However, as we will show later, pictural representations of emotions may be superior to words, because words tend to be controlled by the lexical executive system, pictures have privileged access to the semantic system (W. R. Glaser & Glaser, 1989).

Because fear/anxiety is an emotion of key relevance to the airport retail environment, we will now discuss this in greater detail in the following section.