A validation and comparison of three measures of participants’ disposition to feel moved (introducing the Geneva Sentimentality Scale)

Abstract

In the past years, psychologists have been increasingly interested in feelings of “being moved” (or “touched”) and their impact on cognition and behaviour. However, to better understand their long-term impact, we need a validated measure of participants’ disposition to feel “moved”. In this paper, we introduce the Geneva Sentimentality Scale (GSS), a measure of participants’ disposition to feel moved. After describing its construction (Study 1) and confirming its structure and internal coherence (Study 2), we compare it to two other measures of participants’ disposition to feel moved: the Kama Muta Frequency scale (KAMF) and a single-item measure (“I often feel moved”). We show that all three measures reliably predict participants’ response to moving stimuli (Study 2) and their feelings of being moved in the past week (Study 3) and next week (Study 5). Moreover, we show that the GSS and KAMF have good test–retest reliability (Studies 4 & 5). Overall, we conclude that all three measures provide experimenters with useful tools to investigate the role feelings of being moved play in our lives.