I really like this title as even though i love how psychologists have been able to explain pretty much anything, i also love how some things simply cant be explained like my need to make random noises and throw rice on the floor (which my housemates must love). A lot of emotions are simply unexplainable as my only boy housemate loves to remind me “girls dont even know how theyre feeling” and a lot of the time MEN AND WOMEN don’t. We may feel angry and have no reason to feel like this or we may hide our true feelings which therefore cant be measured. So my argument is that we can measure a lot of things but not subjective unexplainable feelings. But what we can do is use the process of operationalization where we give subjective concepts, constructs. For example the big five of personality from costa and mcrae has attempted to give constructs to different areas of a personality (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion,agreeableness and neuroticism. A personality is a very varied thing and therefore this theory has been criticized as many argue it cant possibly explain all personalities.
To round things up, it would be great to be able to explain everything but also a bit boring and it really isnt possible to exactly measure every emotion and behaviour.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~pe/hp602web/HP602VA14.htm
waaah 
This topic is great! The second you tell someone that you are studying psychology they reply with something along the lines of ‘Are you going to ask my how I’m feeling about that?’ but we can never actually know how someone is really feeling. Feelings are a covert behaviour and can only be measured by the person experiencing them, although what they measure it against may be completely different to to how another person would rate it, as everyone has different life experiences. Therefore it would be wrong to say that psychologists can measure anything because even though they technically could measure emotion, like you say the concept is so subjective and feelings are different for everyone that we could never be sure of the accuracy.
Technology can actually allow us to accurately measure things that were once thought to be unmeasurable, such as how someone is feeling. Emotional arousal (how calm or excited someone is) can be measured by looking at their skin conductance (galvanic skin response). The response grows when the individual is aroused – excited, attentive, anxious – and drops when the individual is experiencing boredom or when they are relaxed! Devices which measure this are often aimed at children with autism who cannot communicate how they are feeling to enable others to understand and improve their relationships! If we treat cases idiographically it doesn’t matter that everyone experiences feelings differently, but we can measure what gives an individual more arousal, and how strong the emotion is compared to their usual state.
Click to access TR-542.pdf
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i disagree with the last comment how someone is feeling can not just be measured by using skin conductance the responses might go up because the person is nervous and an experiment can claim the person is excited when they are not just because the reading went up so its not a great way to measure how a person is feeling. also asking how people feel is not a good way to measure how they are feeling as many people lie and say they are fine when really they are feeling nervous. i agree if we knew everything that it would be boring as no one would need to look into anything.
Hey Laurence thats a wicked argument, us psychologists make a great effort in trying to measure everything and things like emotional arousal can be great indicators but i still dont feel like its enough? They may get close to how the individual is feeling, for example excited but what about the vague emotions? I dont think we can ever find a completely valid scale for emotion or how we could go about it? Technology gives us some clue but as i said i dont think people themselves know exactly how theyre feeling. Great link but as it said confounding variables need to be controlled and that is a pretty hard situation as we cant control the persons first experiences of the day (maybe tired waking up) lots of traffic on the way to the study etc.
Hey that was a good blog. It was a bit short and needed more support to back up your point. It was extremely relevant. It applies to the real world as well as the research side.Its very true that not EVERYTHING or every little thing needs to be examined and defined. Sometimes it is better not to be in the know then to be in the know. If you had more support to back up your argument it would be an excellent blog!
I agree that alot of things cannot be measured my psychologists and there is a certain amount of guesswork invoved in measuring alot of hypthetical constructs such as anger, fear, happiness etc. This is not only because these can’t be seen and observed and require operational definitions to be measured, and there is no guarentee that the operational definition measures the construct. Also I dont know anyone who knows how angry/fearful they are at a specific time (I certainly dont I know when I’m hungry/tired and thats about it) meaning there is a lack of reliability in this research as someone could be feeling the same on two seperate occasions and despite this rate themselves differently on a self report of emotions.
I do wish you wouldn’t throw rice on the floor.
This blog was fascinating! I totally agree with what you say about subjective, unexplainable feelings – they can’t be measured accurately. For example, whether or not you truly love someone. Several theories have been introduced to attempt to measure and explain love, like Hatfield and Walster (1978) and their concept of passionate love, and the Passionate Love Scale (Hatfield & Sprecher, 1986). But neither of these explanations really EXPLAIN or accurately MEASURE what we feel, because sometimes we don’t even know! Plus sometimes, I think it is better to have some mysteries about our inner feelings.
Hatfield and Walster (1978); Hatfield and Sprecher (1986) = http://www2.hawaii.edu/~elaineh/71.pdf
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