No doubt the original researcher did not mean this as Humor, it certainly should be a candidate for an IgNoble Award. As seen hear.
No doubt you've heard of a speedometer, an odometer, a barometer and a thermometer. You might have heard of a pedometer (walking), a hygrometer (humidity) or an anemometer (wind speed).
But I'll bet you haven't heard of a Dag-ometer.
Well, neither had I until last week. "Dag" refers to Differential Affect Gap and, without mincing words, it is used to measure the schmaltz level of songs.
The Australian Broadcasting Corp. reported that Emery Schubert, a University of New South Wales music psychologist, had a gut feeling why some people found some songs repulsive and others found them uplifting. So he studied people's reactions to songs and developed a scale of 1-7 on the Dag-ometer, with seven being the greatest distance between the emotion of the music and the emotion of the listener.
His idea is that "if you can measure the emotion that a piece of music is trying to convey, and if you rate that by the particular listener, you can also measure the emotion that the listener is experiencing as a result of listening, and if you take the difference of those two, you get what's called the Differential Affect Gap."
So if, for example, if Paul Anka's "My Way" makes you slam your head into a wall and shout, "I hate this freakin' song!" then there is going to be a large gap between felt and expressed emotion.
Only a psychologist would come up with a system for something that the rest of mankind is content to dismiss with a simple "This song sucks."
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