Supplementary file 1_ISIT: a frame-clustering implicit measure of situated experience.docx

Introduction<p>The Implicit Situation Intensity Test (ISIT) is a method for converting participants’ verbal reports about an experience into a quantitative, per-participant implicit measure of how strongly cognitive, emotional, behavioral, and value-laden frames have been activated by that experience.</p>Method<p>ISIT operates by clustering frames extracted from the verbal report’s extended knowledge graph (XKG)—the structured representation produced by the POLANYI++ neurosymbolic pipeline—into a Frame Ontology (FO) and scoring each frame’s salience for each participant on a normalized scale.

The implicit measure produced by ISIT is designed to be combined with explicit measures from standardized questionnaires, implicit measures from physiological sensors, and participant profile information, in a single multivariate analysis of situated experience, producing participant-level scores, suitable for psychometric integration.</p>Results<p>We illustrate the method through the Lucifora et al. study on virtual male embodiment in a catcalling scenario (n = 36), in which a 37-indicator Frame Ontology spanning four domains (emotional states, behavioral responses, violence perception, and semantic markers), whose frame clusters entered the study’s multivariate correlation structure alongside the standardized instruments and emotion ratings; safety-related frames showed differential correlation patterns with anger and sadness versus with fear that simpler instruments do not capture.