Two studies describe the development of a visual analogue mood scale which provides subjects with the options of indicating that they do not understand the meaning of particular adjectives, or that they have no affective referents for specific words. Thus, invalid data from forced-choice ratings are eliminated. The new scale provided reliable data. As expected, partialling acquiescence response bias from interitem correlation coefficients significantly increased the number of negative correlations. The content of the adjective list was found to affect subjects' responses significantly. This finding raises questions concerning the adequacy of recently proposed taxonomies of emotional experience which were based on restricted samples of emotion-descriptive adjectives.
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