Exploring effects of response biases in affect induction procedures

David J. Moulds; Jona Meyer; Janet F. McLean; Vera Kempe

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0285706

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionNovember 16, 2022
13 Mar 2023 Decision Letter - Daniela Maria Romano, Editor PONE-D-22-30135Exploring effects of response biases in affect induction proceduresPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Kempe, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. Please submit your revised manuscript by Apr 27 2023 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file. 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Reviewer 1 In the introduction, when building the argument of self-reports against behavioural or physiological measures (line 72-74), should have more references to back up the argument (recent publications). When the authors state the need to investigate the biases in self-reports should have a paragraph explaining what has been done up to date in this area (line 74-77). The same issue occurs in (line 84) when stating the need to use facial expressions. It should be an up-to-date paragraph stating the need to also include FACS in your investigation. Even though after proposing using FACS, you show examples, the build-up to find the need or gap should be further explained and explicit, especially if you then expose the positives and several negative reasons for using physiological indicators for this kind of research which is latter confirmed in the results. The study is well presented, with relevant references that support the study design. There is a “NOTE” in line 195- 220 that explain different outcomes of possible results that are redundant and without references to back up the claims; maybe this should go in the discussion? METHOD: Four years to collect the data? please explain Reviewer 2 The manuscript is clearly written and well-motivated. I think this study is a useful incremental contribution to the literature and ongoing discussion of the validity of AIPs. I would encourage the authors to consider discussing how demand effects may be moderated by experiment presentation (in other words, is it possible that active appraisal changes how participants view the goals or demands of the experiment?). However, I do not believe this request is sufficient to waylay publication. Best Regards [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 5. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: This paper explores the effects of affect-induced procedures such as self-reports or ratings (AIPs) in a between-participants design by using images and music to induce affect/mood by measuring actively and passively participants, at the same time, if they are correlated with facial expressions to understand if the responses are genuine or have cultural or context biases. In the introduction, when building the argument of self-reports against behavioural or physiological measures (line 72-74), should have more references to back up the argument (recent publications). When the authors state the need to investigate the biases in self-reports should have a paragraph explaining what has been done up to date in this area (line 74-77). The same issue occurs in (line 84) when stating the need to use facial expressions. It should be an up-to-date paragraph stating the need to also include FACS in your investigation. Even though after proposing using FACS, you show examples, the build-up to find the need or gap should be further explained and explicit, especially if you then expose the positives and several negative reasons for using physiological indicators for this kind of research which is latter confirmed in the results. The study is well presented, with relevant references that support the study design. There is a “NOTE” in line 195- 220 that explain different outcomes of possible results that are redundant and without references to back up the claims; maybe this should go in the discussion? METHOD: Four years to collect the data? 162 participants, In 6 conditions (ten males and ten females per condition) The participants are well described, as well as the materials in the test and the protocols. MATERIALS AND MEASURES: The experiment is well presented, with several steps to reduce error, with appropriate ethics and randomised. Results: The statistical tests are suitable for this type of data, especially for linear regression. Reviewer #2: The authors report an interesting experiment investigating the validity of affect induction procedures (AIP). Specifically, consenting participants underwent a traditional AIP (i.e., sad, happy, or neutral images + audio) and then completed a series of self-ratings. Crucially, in a between-participants design, half of the participants passively viewed the affective imagery, whereas the other half were required to actively appraise them. The logic of the experimental design is that, if self-ratings following AIP are subject to demand effects, then there should be no difference between the two experimental conditions (i.e., the demand effects are the same in both conditions). The author find a significant attenuation in affect-congruent self-ratings for the active appraisal condition compared to the passive viewing condition. Automatic coding of emotion via facial expressions was found to be a poor measure and unimpacted by AIP. The authors have graciously made their data publicly available. Because of this, I was able to independently verify their statistical findings. The attenuation in mood-congruent ratings is significant despite the between-participants design and relatively small number of participants per bin. In fact, this interaction remains significant under a quite a number of robust statistics (e.g., robust regression using the Student-t distribution, laplace regression to evaluate differences in medians, etc.). As such, I am confident in their findings as reported. The manuscript is clearly written and well-motivated. I think this study is a useful incremental contribution to the literature and ongoing discussion of the validity of AIPs. I would encourage the authors to consider discussing how demand effects may be moderated by experiment presentation (in other words, is it possible that active appraisal changes how participants view the goals or demands of the experiment?). However, I do not believe this request is sufficient to waylay publication. In all, kudos to the authors for this interesting study and contribution to the literature! ****** 6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #1: Yes: Felipe Sheward Reviewer #2: No ******** [NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.] While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0285706.r001
Revision 1
3 Apr 2023 Author Response Dear Editor, Thank you for processing our submission and sending the helpful comments from the reviewers. Below we explain how we have addressed their concerns and suggestions. We also have amended the reference list as requested by the reviewers. Sincerely, Vera Kempe (for all authors) Reviewer 1 In the introduction, when building the argument of self-reports against behavioural or physiological measures (line 72-74), should have more references to back up the argument (recent publications). Response: We agree with Reviewer 1 that it would be important to provide more recent evidence. However, an extensive search confirmed our assertion, expressed in the draft in line 68, that this issue has faded from attention in more recent work. To support this, we have now included further references in lines 71 and 74 which have also been cited in a recent meta-analysis (Joseph et al, 2020) which are all of an earlier date. When the authors state the need to investigate the biases in self-reports should have a paragraph explaining what has been done up to date in this area (line 74-77). Response: Despite occasional concerns about biases in self-reports in the literature, our main point is that not much has been done in this area since the compelling meta-analysis by Westermann et al. from 1996. This is precisely what we are trying to remedy with our work. Our aim is clarified by the following sentence in line 68 ‘More recently, these discussions seem to have faded from attention even though the issues are far from settled, and most manipulation checks of AIPs still use self-reports.’ We hope the reviewer can agree with our concern that this issue needed to be taken up and scrutinised more thoroughly. The same issue occurs in (line 84) when stating the need to use facial expressions. It should be an up-to-date paragraph stating the need to also include FACS in your investigation. Even though after proposing using FACS, you show examples, the build-up to find the need or gap should be further explained and explicit, especially if you then expose the positives and several negative reasons for using physiological indicators for this kind of research which is latter confirmed in the results. Response: We thank the reviewer for pointing out the lack of clarity on our motivation for focussing on FaceReader. We have now added a sentence in line 89 to this effect, which reads ‘However, human coding of facial expressions using FACS is costly as it requires extensive certified training of the coders (12,13).‘ We feel that adding another paragraph discussing FACS would unduly lengthen the paper and divert focus but we are happy to take editorial guidance on this. The study is well presented, with relevant references that support the study design. There is a “NOTE” in line 195- 220 that explain different outcomes of possible results that are redundant and without references to back up the claims; maybe this should go in the discussion? Response: We thought it is important to justify in the Introduction why we are employing a two-tailed hypothesis; we fear it would create confusion for the reader to leave this important consideration for the Discussion. We agree that justification for the hypothesised outcomes would gain in persuasiveness if motivated by previous work so we included references to the literature on the link between emotions and cognitive load and to the measurement effects in the field of emotion research. METHOD: Four years to collect the data? please explain Response: We understand the reviewer’s concern about our data collection procedure but data collection had to be interrupted due to personal circumstances of one of the authors. Reviewer 2 The manuscript is clearly written and well-motivated. I think this study is a useful incremental contribution to the literature and ongoing discussion of the validity of AIPs. I would encourage the authors to consider discussing how demand effects may be moderated by experiment presentation (in other words, is it possible that active appraisal changes how participants view the goals or demands of the experiment?). However, I do not believe this request is sufficient to waylay publication. Response: Wе thank Reviewer 2 for the positive evaluation of this work. We agree that it is possible that participants in the Passive Exposure condition are subject to demand characteristics in the sense that their mood reporting is affected by an appraisal of the images in addition to a reporting of their affective state. However, this would mean that in the Active Appraisal condition participants have already completed their appraisal when asked to report on their mood indicating the genuine effect of the mood induction above and beyond any appraisal-related demand characteristics. We have now clarified this in the Introduction in line 203-204. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0285706.r002
2 May 2023 Decision Letter - Daniela Maria Romano, Editor Exploring effects of response biases in affect induction procedures PONE-D-22-30135R1 Dear Dr. Kempe, We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements. Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter, and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication. An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org. Kind regards, Daniela M. Romano Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0285706.r003
Formally Accepted
4 May 2023 Acceptance Letter - Daniela Maria Romano, Editor PONE-D-22-30135R1 Exploring effects of response biases in affect induction procedures Dear Dr. Kempe: I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now with our production department. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information please contact onepress@plos.org. If we can help with anything else, please email us at plosone@plos.org. Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access. Kind regards, PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff on behalf of Professor Daniela Maria Romano Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0285706.r004

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