ABSTRACT
The strength of an emotion is its degree of being a passion. Strength or intensity hardly forms a subject of research in emotions research. The Psammenitus story and multicomponential theory preclude a simple index of the strength of an emotion. The difficulty of defining emotion strength becomes even greater when attending to other than immediately accessible response components. To obtain more insight in the structure of all those parameters, a questionnaire study was made of the subjective intensity of potential strength variables in recalled emotion incidents. Felt intensity of different emotions indeed was determined by different aspects. Concern strength is not easily measured, although efforts have been made; for instance, one might measure risk taken and effort spent in reaching a goal. This chapter concludes that emotion strength is a meaningful and unitary notion, but that it is difficult to find appropriate measures, apart from overall feeling ratings, that are not applicable to animals and suffer from end-value bias.
