The Circumplex Structure of Affective Social Behavior

The authors extended the circumplex structure of emotion to naturally unfolding affective social behaviors. The emotion circumplex describes the circular spacing of emotions and has been harvested from covariation patterns among emotion words, self-reported emotional experience, and judgments of posed facial expression. The distance between emotions is a function of two orthogonal dimensions referred to as valence and arousal. In the present study, 79 participants' 19 affective social behaviors were coded in each of four dyadic social interactions. Confirmatory factor analysis indicated that affective social behaviors exhibited a circular ordering consistent with a circumplex model. Multidimensional scaling provided evidence for the hypothesized two-dimensional valence and arousal factors. Correlations between circumplex factor scores and two personality measures provided validity evidence for the factors. This research is the first to show that naturally occurring affective social behavior conforms to a circumplex structure.