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Abstract

Hevner's checklist has been widely used to measure emotional responses to music. Since the revision of the checklist by Farnsworth in the 1950s and 1960s, the list has not been updated. 133 musically experienced people were surveyed regarding the suitability of a list of 91 adjectives in describing music. The words consisted of the original 67 from Hevner's adjective circle, and additional words were taken from Russell's circumplex model of emotion (1980) and Whissell's dictionary of affect (1989). The words and clusters were then grouped according to their position on a two-dimensional emotion space. Some of the words used by Hevner but dropped by Farnsworth were reinstated, and 15 other words were dropped. The final list consisted of 46 words grouped into nine clusters in emotion space.

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Update of the Hevner Adjective Checklist

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