ABSTRACT
My interest in dimensional judgments began with notions about the relational character of value experiences. It seemed intuitively self-evident that the pleasantness of any particular event depends on comparisons with similar events. Beebe-Center (1932) expressed this as “the law of hedonic contrast.” It was later articulated mathematically by Helson (1964) as his Theory of Adaptation Level: The standard for judgment, called the adaptation level, is the arithmetic mean of all contextual values on the dimension of judgment; any particular judgment is directly proportional to the deviation of its eliciting stimulus from this mean (with stimulus values usually log transforms of their physical values). Because deviations from a mean necessarily sum to zero, Adaptation-Level Theory implies an even overall balance between positive and negative judgments.
