Discrete Emotions Questionnaire

Harmon-Jones, C., Bastian, B., & Harmon-Jones, E. (2016). The Discrete Emotions Questionnaire: A New Tool for Measuring State Self-Reported Emotions.  PLoS ONE. 11(8): e0159915. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0159915

F.A.Q.

• You do not need to ask permission to use the questionnaire, but we would be delighted if you emailed us a copy of your research article published using the questionnaire.

• You may translate the questionnaire into another language. If you plan to translate the Discrete Emotions Questionnaire into another language, we recommend that you do some of the same studies we did to discover the best words to use (C. Harmon-Jones et al., 2016, PlosOne).

• The words should be presented in an order that appear random to the participant (i.e., don't present all of the anger words first). 

• If you are only interested in using a few subscales, we recommend that you try to include an equal number of positive and negative emotion words, so that participants will not be biased toward one valence in terms of how they are feeling.

• When using the DEQ, it is important to be mindful of the instructions participants receive, as we demonstrated in Harmon-Jones, Bastian, and Harmon-Jones (2016, Emotion). Therefore, if you are measuring emotional responses to specific situations, use the following instructions: "Please indicate your response using the scale provided. While (undergoing the emotional experience, e. g., viewing the photographs, reading the story, etc.) to what extent did you experience these emotions?" Please replace the text in brackets with the actual event that participants experienced. 

• With the DEQ, you are welcome to measure other discrete emotions that are not on the DEQ (such as guilt). All you need to do is add words (synonyms) for another emotion and mix them with the DEQ items. Ideally, you should use the methods we used in the first studies of the 2016 PlosOne paper. If that is not possible, just add words and then check that the items hang together (i.e., Cronbach's alpha). Please send us your publications in which you added emotion words to the DEQ. We will also update this website to include newly developed subscales for additional discrete emotions.  

• We have added some words to measure humility (Summerell et al., 2020); they are borrowed from the research of Rowatt et al. (2006).  They are: humble, modest, tolerant, down-to-earth, respectful, and open-minded.  They show good internal consistency. 

• Sometimes people complain that the DEQ includes both adjectives and nouns. However, all of the items are valid responses to the question in the instructions in our research, "...to what extent did you experience these emotions?" We used the words that were most frequently generated by participants.