Uncanny Valley Effect
This is the most up to date version of this scale.
Downloads
PAPER
Ho, C. C., & MacDorman, K. F. (2017). Measuring the uncanny valley effect: Refinements to indices for perceived humanness, attractiveness, and eeriness. International Journal of Social Robotics, 9, 129-139.
Construct Summary
The authors define the uncanny valley effect as:
“…cold, eerie feelings, associated with, but not equivalent to, fear, anxiety, and disgust, a loss of empathy, and avoidance behavior.” (p. 1)
Final Scale Items (18 total):
Items are semantic differential recorded at 7-point values ranging from -3 to +3. The eeriness factor is split into eerie and spine-tingling subfactors. Items with * are contained within the sub-factor spine-tingling.
Perceived Humanness: Without Definite Lifespan/Immortal, Synthetic/Real, Inanimate/Living, Mechanical Movement/Biological Movement, Human-made/Humanlike
Attractiveness: Messy/Sleek, Repulsive/Agreeable, Crude/Stylish, Ugly/Beautiful
Eeriness: Dull/Freak, Ordinary/Supernatural, Plain/Weird, Predictable/Eerie, Uninspiring/Spine-tingling, Bland/Uncanny, Boring/Shocking, Predictable/Thrilling, Unemotional/Hair-raising*
Rating = 69%
| Check? | Guideline Item |
|---|---|
| ✓ | Is the construct defined? |
| ✓ | Does the final version of the items capture the construct as it has been defined by the authors? |
| ✓ | Is the item generation process discussed (e.g., literature review, Delphi method, crowd-sourcing)? |
| ✓ | Person to items 10:1 for the initial set of items? |
| ✓ | Did they perform an EFA, PCA, Rasch, or similar test to determine the item to factor relationship? |
| ✓ | Did they describe how they determined number of factors? |
| ✖ | Did they report the full initial set of items? |
| ✖ | Did they provide loadings (EFA) or item fits (Rasch) of all items? |
| ✓ | Is there a description of the item removal process (e.g., using infit/outfit, factor loading minimum value, or cross-loading values)? |
| ✓ | Did they list the final items included in the scale? |
| ✖ | Did they include a factor structure test (e.g., second EFA, CFA, DIF, test for unidimensionality when using Rasch, or similar)? |
| ✓ | Was a measure of reliability (e.g., Cronbach’s alpha, McDonalds Omega_h or Omega_t, Tarkkonen’s Rho) reported? |
| ✖ | Was a test of validity (e.g., predictive, concurrent, convergent, discriminant) reported? |
Comments CFA was not run on a new sample. Definition is ambiguous. Test of validity was an internal correlation between factors.
PDF of scale as well as instructions for administration and scoring are not readily available. Check the paper for more details or email hriscaledatabase@gmail.com to submit this information if you are the author of this scale.