Module 1
Positive and Negative Affectivity:
Affect: The word “affect” is basically a more technical way to talk about emotion and
expression. It refers to the emotions or feelings that we experience and display, especially in
terms of how these emotions influence us to act and make decisions.
What is positive and negative affect?
Positive affectivity refers to positive emotions and expression, including
cheerfulness, pride, enthusiasm, energy, and joy.
Negative affectivity is negative emotions and expression, which includes sadness,
disgust, lethargy, fear, and distress.
Positive and negative affectivity not only plays a large role in our day-to-day
experience and our enjoyment, and our affectivity can also influence our opinions,
thoughts, performance, abilities, and even our brain activity!
Examples of positive affect:
o Joy
o Contentment
o Interest
o Engagement
o Pride
Examples of negative affect:
o Anger
o Fear
o Anxiety
o Sadness
o Depression
People often assume that positive and negative affect are on two opposite ends of a
bipolar scale. You can only be at one point on this scale, meaning you can be
experiencing one type of affect to a certain degree (from extremely mild to extremely
strong), but not the other at the same time.
The words ‘happiness’ and ‘well-being’ are used interchangeably.
the hedonic concept of happiness is the attainment of subjective wellbeing (SWB).
It encompasses how people evaluate their own lives in terms
of cognitive and affective explanations, and can be represented in the following way:
SWB = SATISFACTION WITH LIFE + AFFECT
The first, cognitive part of subjective well-being is expressed by life satisfaction.
Life satisfaction represents one’s assessment of one’s own life.
,Diener argues that it refers to discrepancy between the present situation and what is thought
to be the ideal or deserved standard (Veenhoven, 1991).
One is satisfied when there is little or no discrepancy between the present and what is thought
to be an ideal or deserved situation.
On the other hand, dissatisfaction is a result of a substantial discrepancy between present
conditions and the ideal standard. Dissatisfaction can also be a result of comparing oneself
with others.
Affect represents the emotional side of SWB.
The notion of affect comprises both positive and negative moods and emotions that are
associated with our everyday experiences.
Affect refers to the emotional side of wellbeing, including moods and emotions associated
with experiencing momentary events (Diener et al., 1999a).
There needs to be a balance between the experiencing of positive and negative affect as well
as an acknowledgement of the difference in frequency versus intensity of positive affect
(Diener et al., 1991).
Even though common sense would suggest that we should feel most happy if we experience
the maximum amount of intense positive affect and not very frequent negative affect,
researchers demonstrate that this is not the case.
They show that, whilst it is very important to experience positive affect often, the intense
positive affect is not necessary for well-being.
Ultimately, people who report higher levels of SWB tend to demonstrate:
higher levels of creativity,
increased task persistence,
multitasking,
being systematic,
optimism,
attending to relevant negative information.
longevity,
less vulnerability to illness,
sociability,
trust,
helpfulness, and
less hostility and less self-centredness
(Diener, 2000).
The role of pleasure
One of the criticisms of SWB is that it fixates too heavily on the experience of pleasure and
positive affect, rather than what is meaningful.
On average, humans seek pleasure and try to avoid pain, due to activation of the brain’s
‘pleasure centre’.
,Pleasure is not enough to make humans happy and fulfilled.
Furthermore, when given the chance, individuals would rather exist in a real world, with the
potential to experience both pleasure and pain, than a world that provides only pleasure and
positive stimulation (Nozick, 1974).
(Dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens (part of forebrain) is so consistently tied
with pleasure that neuroscientists refer to the region as the brain's pleasure center.
All drugs of abuse, from nicotine to heroin, cause a particularly powerful surge of dopamine
in the nucleus accumbens.)
Measuring SWB
Subjective wellbeing encompasses how people evaluate their own lives in terms of affective
and cognitive explanations (Diener, 2000) .
there are multiple SWB scales (SWLS, PANAS).
1. The majority of tools are single occasion, self-report tools such as the
Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS) (Diener et al., 1985) and
Subjective Happiness Scale (Lyubomirsky and Lepper, 1999; Lyubomirsky, 2008)
Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) scales (Watson et al., 1988) and the
Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS; Diener et al., 1985).
PANAS- provides a list of feelings and emotions and respondents are asked to indicate the
extent to which they felt this way during a given period, e.g. the past week. The PANAS is
very flexible in that it does not specify particular feelings and emotions and many different
combinations are possible: interested, distressed, excited, upset, strong, guilty, et cetera.
Items from SWLS solicit responses from individuals about the extent to which they agree or
disagree with certain statements and it is designed specifically to capture satisfaction with
life.
Three Paths to Happiness
In his 2002 book Authentic Happiness, Seligman proposed three ‘orientations’ of being
happy, or three kinds of happiness:
1) Pleasure:
An individual leading a life of pleasure can be seen as maximizing positive emotions and
minimizing negative emotions.
2)Engagement:
An individual leading a life of engagement constantly seeks out activities that allow her to be
in flow.
Flow, coined by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, is a state of deep, effortless involvement. It occurs
most frequently when we concentrate our undivided attention on activities that are
, moderately challenging to us. When you are in flow, it may seem that your sense of self
vanishes, and time stops.
Seligman recommends that in order to achieve flow, you must identify your signature
strengths, or strengths that are deeply characteristic of yourself, and learn how to practice
them.
3) Meaning
An individual leading a life of meaning belongs to and serves something that is bigger than
himself.
These larger entities could be family, religion, community, country, or even ideas.
For the 2002 Seligman, an individual trying to lead a full life would have to fulfill all three
orientations to happiness:
she experiences positive emotions;
derive engagement and gratification as she exercises her signature strengths; and
she uses these strengths in the service of something larger to obtain meaning.
A new theory: P.E.R.M.A:
The 3 Orientations to Happiness was a good theory.
But things change. Nine years later, in 2011, Seligman publishes a new book, Flourish .
In it, he gives the Orientations to Happiness the cold shoulder and reveals his new brainchild,
PERMA .
Seligman isn’t happy with his old theory for a few reasons.
First, he criticizes it for being too narrow and containing too few categories.
He also puts it down for focusing too much on life satisfaction, which he sees as being too
dependent on mood.
Well-being, he argues, should exceed the hedonic, and be more than fleeting emotions.
In this way, Seligman paints his old theory as one-dimensional, and proposes an alternative:
PERMA.
PERMA adds two more elements of well-being to the Orientations to Happiness:
Accomplishment and Positive Relationships.
The five elements of the theory form the acronym:
P(leasure)
E(ngagement)
R(elationships)
M(eaning)
A(ccomplishment)
Accomplishment
Accomplishment involves the pursuit of success, winning, achievement and mastery, both as
end-goals and as processes. Seligman argues that many people would pursue accomplishment
Positive and Negative Affectivity:
Affect: The word “affect” is basically a more technical way to talk about emotion and
expression. It refers to the emotions or feelings that we experience and display, especially in
terms of how these emotions influence us to act and make decisions.
What is positive and negative affect?
Positive affectivity refers to positive emotions and expression, including
cheerfulness, pride, enthusiasm, energy, and joy.
Negative affectivity is negative emotions and expression, which includes sadness,
disgust, lethargy, fear, and distress.
Positive and negative affectivity not only plays a large role in our day-to-day
experience and our enjoyment, and our affectivity can also influence our opinions,
thoughts, performance, abilities, and even our brain activity!
Examples of positive affect:
o Joy
o Contentment
o Interest
o Engagement
o Pride
Examples of negative affect:
o Anger
o Fear
o Anxiety
o Sadness
o Depression
People often assume that positive and negative affect are on two opposite ends of a
bipolar scale. You can only be at one point on this scale, meaning you can be
experiencing one type of affect to a certain degree (from extremely mild to extremely
strong), but not the other at the same time.
The words ‘happiness’ and ‘well-being’ are used interchangeably.
the hedonic concept of happiness is the attainment of subjective wellbeing (SWB).
It encompasses how people evaluate their own lives in terms
of cognitive and affective explanations, and can be represented in the following way:
SWB = SATISFACTION WITH LIFE + AFFECT
The first, cognitive part of subjective well-being is expressed by life satisfaction.
Life satisfaction represents one’s assessment of one’s own life.
,Diener argues that it refers to discrepancy between the present situation and what is thought
to be the ideal or deserved standard (Veenhoven, 1991).
One is satisfied when there is little or no discrepancy between the present and what is thought
to be an ideal or deserved situation.
On the other hand, dissatisfaction is a result of a substantial discrepancy between present
conditions and the ideal standard. Dissatisfaction can also be a result of comparing oneself
with others.
Affect represents the emotional side of SWB.
The notion of affect comprises both positive and negative moods and emotions that are
associated with our everyday experiences.
Affect refers to the emotional side of wellbeing, including moods and emotions associated
with experiencing momentary events (Diener et al., 1999a).
There needs to be a balance between the experiencing of positive and negative affect as well
as an acknowledgement of the difference in frequency versus intensity of positive affect
(Diener et al., 1991).
Even though common sense would suggest that we should feel most happy if we experience
the maximum amount of intense positive affect and not very frequent negative affect,
researchers demonstrate that this is not the case.
They show that, whilst it is very important to experience positive affect often, the intense
positive affect is not necessary for well-being.
Ultimately, people who report higher levels of SWB tend to demonstrate:
higher levels of creativity,
increased task persistence,
multitasking,
being systematic,
optimism,
attending to relevant negative information.
longevity,
less vulnerability to illness,
sociability,
trust,
helpfulness, and
less hostility and less self-centredness
(Diener, 2000).
The role of pleasure
One of the criticisms of SWB is that it fixates too heavily on the experience of pleasure and
positive affect, rather than what is meaningful.
On average, humans seek pleasure and try to avoid pain, due to activation of the brain’s
‘pleasure centre’.
,Pleasure is not enough to make humans happy and fulfilled.
Furthermore, when given the chance, individuals would rather exist in a real world, with the
potential to experience both pleasure and pain, than a world that provides only pleasure and
positive stimulation (Nozick, 1974).
(Dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens (part of forebrain) is so consistently tied
with pleasure that neuroscientists refer to the region as the brain's pleasure center.
All drugs of abuse, from nicotine to heroin, cause a particularly powerful surge of dopamine
in the nucleus accumbens.)
Measuring SWB
Subjective wellbeing encompasses how people evaluate their own lives in terms of affective
and cognitive explanations (Diener, 2000) .
there are multiple SWB scales (SWLS, PANAS).
1. The majority of tools are single occasion, self-report tools such as the
Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS) (Diener et al., 1985) and
Subjective Happiness Scale (Lyubomirsky and Lepper, 1999; Lyubomirsky, 2008)
Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) scales (Watson et al., 1988) and the
Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS; Diener et al., 1985).
PANAS- provides a list of feelings and emotions and respondents are asked to indicate the
extent to which they felt this way during a given period, e.g. the past week. The PANAS is
very flexible in that it does not specify particular feelings and emotions and many different
combinations are possible: interested, distressed, excited, upset, strong, guilty, et cetera.
Items from SWLS solicit responses from individuals about the extent to which they agree or
disagree with certain statements and it is designed specifically to capture satisfaction with
life.
Three Paths to Happiness
In his 2002 book Authentic Happiness, Seligman proposed three ‘orientations’ of being
happy, or three kinds of happiness:
1) Pleasure:
An individual leading a life of pleasure can be seen as maximizing positive emotions and
minimizing negative emotions.
2)Engagement:
An individual leading a life of engagement constantly seeks out activities that allow her to be
in flow.
Flow, coined by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, is a state of deep, effortless involvement. It occurs
most frequently when we concentrate our undivided attention on activities that are
, moderately challenging to us. When you are in flow, it may seem that your sense of self
vanishes, and time stops.
Seligman recommends that in order to achieve flow, you must identify your signature
strengths, or strengths that are deeply characteristic of yourself, and learn how to practice
them.
3) Meaning
An individual leading a life of meaning belongs to and serves something that is bigger than
himself.
These larger entities could be family, religion, community, country, or even ideas.
For the 2002 Seligman, an individual trying to lead a full life would have to fulfill all three
orientations to happiness:
she experiences positive emotions;
derive engagement and gratification as she exercises her signature strengths; and
she uses these strengths in the service of something larger to obtain meaning.
A new theory: P.E.R.M.A:
The 3 Orientations to Happiness was a good theory.
But things change. Nine years later, in 2011, Seligman publishes a new book, Flourish .
In it, he gives the Orientations to Happiness the cold shoulder and reveals his new brainchild,
PERMA .
Seligman isn’t happy with his old theory for a few reasons.
First, he criticizes it for being too narrow and containing too few categories.
He also puts it down for focusing too much on life satisfaction, which he sees as being too
dependent on mood.
Well-being, he argues, should exceed the hedonic, and be more than fleeting emotions.
In this way, Seligman paints his old theory as one-dimensional, and proposes an alternative:
PERMA.
PERMA adds two more elements of well-being to the Orientations to Happiness:
Accomplishment and Positive Relationships.
The five elements of the theory form the acronym:
P(leasure)
E(ngagement)
R(elationships)
M(eaning)
A(ccomplishment)
Accomplishment
Accomplishment involves the pursuit of success, winning, achievement and mastery, both as
end-goals and as processes. Seligman argues that many people would pursue accomplishment
