Removing response style from affective ratings

Abstract

Response style is a tendency to select specific categories regardless of the content, e.g. extreme or midpoint categories. It is observed consistently in various tasks, such as affective judgment tasks and standard psychological questionnaires. It degrades the validity of the analysis of subjective ratings such as correlation and variance-based analyses. This paper proposes a response-style removal method for affective ratings. An experiment demonstrates promising results. The proposed technique has the potential to open up the horizons for research in affective computing and other related areas.