How Do You Feel About Your Feelings?
I received an email as I sat in a coffee shop yesterday inviting me to participate in a psychological test regarding how I manage emotions. I opened the online survey, ready to attempt to communicate an accurate portrayal of myself through the confines of the questions and their corresponding response selections. As I embarked on the twenty-minute self-report questionnaire I, ironically, grew in frustration.
I texted one of my more perspicacious friends to share my frustration, not exactly sure why I was frustrated at first. Then I found my thumbs identifying my frustration as the questionnaire’s use of “…vague descriptions of feels with sentences full of equivocal terms” [concluding with a distressed looking emoji]. She sympathized with my annoyance toward the ambiguity then asked me whether I think I will be able to understand myself better in the end. My reply: “Nope. And even worse, I think the authors of the survey will not have an accurate understanding of what they are looking for within me.”
The main conclusive feeling I gathered from this experience was that the defining characteristics of psychological tests had been threatened in this assessment. Most notably under siege was the central notion that a psychological test samples behavior, largely due to what I had expressed in my text as the “vague descriptions” and “equivocal terms.”
When prompted to rate my agreement with a statement, for example, ‘I just want to avoid being unable to change how I feel,’ how should I respond? Aside from the double negative betraying any hope of clarity, precisely what context should I consider when answering this question? Is “just” used to imply that this desire is fundamental, or takes precedence over other desires in some way? Do I want to “avoid” at all costs? Or does this statement simply mean that I want to have the power to change how I feel? But would this imply that disagreeing with the original statement means, “yes, please take all my power away from me!”?
Even if this statement is, somehow, more clear than my interpretation, it is clearly not clear to me, and so likely fails to give a valid sample of my behavior.
While my failure to understand the questions well enough to give a confident answer characterized the majority of this survey’s inquiry into my emotional life, there were also some beacons of clarity throughout the journey.
In fact, there were some moments of such transparency, that the question framing was so evident that I felt the need to compensate. For example, if a question began by saying, “I am afraid to ask for help…” I may think that I’m able to ask for help, but because I see by the way this is worded that asking for help would be the right thing to do, I am probably seeing myself better than reality so I should answer farther in the opposite direction. Perhaps it would be better to approach this question with more neutral wording; or perhaps include a complimentary question with the opposite overt bias later on in the assessment to control for the possibility of framing effects.
I could fill up a lot more virtual space with questions and concerns regarding the accuracy and precision of this test — and many other questionnaires like it. But to this test’s merit, I am now encouraged to leave the coffee shop and seek help if I embark on tests of questionable validity in the future and find myself in need of managing my frustration.
