This article is an evaluation of Young's affective arousal theory. Young hypothesizes affective processes which are based on the hedonic continuum from pleasure to displeasure. The cental part between pleasure and displeasure of the hedonic continuum is considered to appear indifferent or neutral affect which is experienced much longer than pleasure or displeasure. We would like to criticize this simple line of hedonic continuum because there are many affective states, for example, rapid changes between pleasure and displeasure, mixed states of pleasure and displeasure, and much longer states of unpleasant affect. Secondly we make a distinction between stimulus and sensation, and between sensation and affect. Thirdly we attempt to divide the appearance of the affective process from the affective arousal process. The appearance of the affective process occurs between sensation and affect and the affective arousal process should be limited to the condition between affect and action. We review Yoshida's research, our own data on the affective arousal experiments and Yogo and other's data on imagination research in this attempt to evaluate Young's theory.

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This study attempted to analyze discomforts in relation to sensory modality and subject's gender. Twenty students were asked to give free description of the experiences they imagined with twenty-seven sentences depicting the situations of a distinct stimulation of four sensory modalities except for gustation. They were also required to rate on the five-point scale their judgments of easiness for reproducing the corresponding situation, easiness for arousing discomfort, and intensity of the discomfort, respectively.
Discomforts were divided into "sensation-based affect" and "cognition-based affect": The former is the affect induced directly by sensory event, as exampled by"I fear darkness itself" to a stimulus sentence "Make a night journey alone", whilst the latter is the affect aroused through cognitive processing, as exampled by"I get a fright by thinking I may be assaulted". Also, discomforts judged as indicating the potentiality for coping behaviour were checked to count their frequency. These judgments were made by experimenters.
The results obtained were as follows: 1) There found no significant difference among modalities and genders, in easiness for recollecting the situation and easiness for arousing the discomfort. 2 ) In all of the four modalities, sensation-based affect was aroused more frequently than cognition-based one. More closely, sensation-based affect was significantly dominant in tactual and olfactory modalities, whilst frequency of cognition-based one was relatively high in both visual and auditory modalities. Females gave larger number of reports on cognition-based affect than males did. 3) Intensity of sensation-based affect showed main effects of two variables and their interaction, whilst that of cognition-based affect showed the modality effect alone. Intensity of sensation-based affect was higher in audition and olfactions, while that of cognition-based affect was the highest in vision. 4) Potentiality for coping behaviour was higher for sensation-based affect than for cognition-based one. Intensity was higher for the discomfort showing the potentiality than for the discomfort showing no sign of it.

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The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of intention in other members' defecting behavior on emotional states and decision in a social dilemma. People may appraise circumstances differently depending on what causes an undesirable event such as inequity of outcomes in a social dilemma. Thus, they may behave differently to cope with the situation. It is hypothesized that the causal attribution of inequity to intentional defection will arouse negative feeling states more strongly and promote defection. On the other hand, such tendency may not be so salient in cases where inequity is due to a system or the structure which they are in. Perceived inequity and intention was manipulated by defecting behaviorof a bogus member created through a computer program. In the experiment, all subjects were in the underprivileded status and were asked how much he/she contribute for the common good on each trial. The results supported the predictions.

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