Independence of Positive and Negative Affect

Definitions

Positive and negative affect are often referred to as the Big Two emotions. They each refer to superfactors of emotion, and according to Randy J. Larsen and Ed Diener, each consists of several subcomponents of different feeling states. Positive affect refers to all highenergy emotions that feel good or pleasurable. Some varieties of such positive emotions are feeling energetic, enthusiasm, engagement, and joy. The situation is similar with negative affect, which has subcomponents of high-energy ways of feeling unpleasant, such as anxiety, worry, and distress as well as fearfulness, anger, hostility, and disgust. As such, positive and negative affect are each composed of several subfactors of emotion that go into defining them.

Conceptual Distinctions

One important distinction concerns the difference between emotional states and emotional traits. Emotion states are feelings that come and go fairly quickly, often are intense, and their cause usually lies outside of the person. You might say you are in a state of anger and that you are angry because of a specific event. The anger may be intense, but it will likely dissipate. Trait emotions, on the other hand, last longer and refer the cause, in part, to some characteristic of the person. You might say, for example, that someone is an angry kind of person, meaning that this person is frequently angry or has a low threshold for becoming angry. This describes a characteristic of the person more than a particular state caused by some event in the environment. Positive and negative affect can be thought of as states or traits, as transient emotions caused by specific events or as relatively enduring characteristics of persons.

The following example makes clear the distinction between states and traits. Consider the two emotions sadness and anger. In terms of states, people are rarely sad and angry at the same time. A person may be angry, but it is very rare for the person to simultaneously be sad. However, if one thinks about traits over a longer time frame, say, over the past 6 months, and ask the question how angry and how sad has a person been over the past 6 months, it is likely that a person reporting a high level of anger will also report a high level of sadness, just not at the same time. So in terms of traits, people who are frequently angry are also frequently sad. Again, just not at the same time. At a trait level, anger and sadness can be highly correlated (they are both part of the negative affect superfactor), whereas at a state level, anger and sadness are not correlated because they do not co-occur at the same time.

Another important distinction is between categorical and dimensional views of emotion. In the field of psychology, some researchers prefer to think of emotions as distinct categories. These researchers often have a list of specific emotions that they consider to be fundamental, usually between six and nine different emotions. These researchers do not clump [Page 469]emotions into positive and negative groups, but rather feel that it is important to maintain distinctions between specific emotions. On the other hand, another group of researchers find some value to the idea that all emotions fall along a few specific dimensions and can thus be grouped. Researchers who prefer to think about positive and negative affect as superfactors are in this camp.

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