The relationship in experience between various types of affect.

Abstract

Universit of MichiganThe co-occurence in experience of various emotions was explored, with the focus on positive versusnegative affect. In Study 1,72 subjects read stories designed to produce varying levels of either positiveor negative affect, and then rated their level of both types of affect. In Study 2, 42 participants ratedtheir feelings during emotional times in everyday life for a period of 6 weeks. We found that emotionsof the same hedonic valence (e.g., fear and anger) tend to co-occur. We also found that positive andnegative affect do not occur together at high levels of intensity. These two facts about the relation ofpositive and negative affect are probably responsible for the bipolarity that is often found betweenthem. These findings represent a challenge to those who postulate that there are unrelated discreteemotions and that the terms positive affect and negative affect do not describe meaningful clusters ofemotions. We found that if one type of affect is of low intensity, the other type can be at any levelfrom low to high. Therefore, a truly inverse and linear relation does not characterize positive andnegative affect. This finding represents a challenge to most structural models of emotion. It appearsthat mutual exclusion only at high levels of intensity characterizes the relation between positive andnegative affect.We explore the relation between feeling particular emotionsand experiencing other emotions. For example, if one feels joy,what is the likelihood…