POSITIVE

AFFECTIVITY
• Positive Affectivity is a trait that reflects stable individual
differences in positve emotnal experience.
• People high on this dimension experience frequent and intense
episodes of pleasant, pleasurable mood.
• They are cheerful, enthusiastic, energetic, confident, and alert.
 EMERGENCE OF POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
• Throughout most of the 20th century affect researchers studied
basic negative emotions.
• The dominant role of the negative emotions reflected, in part,
the seminal influence of Freud, who made the concept of
anxiety a cornerstone of psychoanalytic thought (e.g., Freud,
1936).
• This focus on negative emotionality also was reinforced by Cannon
(1929) and Selye (1936), who established the adverse health
consequences of prolonged fear and anger.
• Finally, this preoccupation with the negative emotions can be
attributed to their obvious survival value (e.g., Nesse, 1991): For
instance, fear motivates organisms to escape from situations of
potential threat or danger, whereas disgust helps to keep them away
from noxious and toxic substances.
• The first major theoretical breakthrough occurred in 1975, with the
publication of Paul Meehl’s landmark examination of “hedonic
capacity”.
• Researchers have established that two largely independent factors
negative affect and positive affect constitute the basic dimensions of
emotional experience. These two broad dimensions have been identified
in both intra-and interindividual analyses, and they emerge consistently
across diverse descriptor sets, time frames, response formats, languages,
and cultures.
THE HIERARCHICAL STRUCTURE OF POSITIVE
AFFECTIVITY
• Self-rated affect is hierarchically structured and is viewed at two
fundamentally different levels: a higher order level that consists of the
general Negative and Positive Affect dimensions and a lower order level
that represents specific types of affect.
• In hierarchical model, the upper level reflects the overall valence of the
affects (i.e., whether they represent pleasant or unpleasant mood states),
whereas the lower level reflects the specific content of mood descriptors
(i.e., the distinctive qualities of each specific type of affect).
 MEASURES OF POSITIVE AFFECTIVITY

• For the sake of convenience, measures of positive affectivity can be divided into
two basic types. First, many widely used affect inventories have a “general” form
(in which respondents rate their typical, average feelings) that can be used to
measure this trait. For instance, the DES, the MAACL-R, and the PANAS-X
• Second, many multitrait personality inventories contain scales relevant to the
construct; examples include the Activity and Positive Emotions facet scales of the
Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R; Costa & McCrae, 1992a), the
Well-Being scale of the Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire (MPQ;
Tellegen, in press), and the Positive Temperament scale of the General
Temperament Survey
TEMPORAL STABILITY AND CROSS-
SITUATIONAL CONSISTENCY TEMPORAL
STABILITY
Does positive affectivity represent a meaningful dimension of individual
differences?
Two characteristics are crucial in establishing the existence of a trait.
1. Temporal stability - individual’s standing on the trait should be relatively
stable over time, such that people maintain a relatively consistent rank
order across assessments.
2. Cross situational consistency - scores on the trait should manifest some
consistency or generality across different situations and contexts.
• Considerable evidence suggests that personality continues to develop and evolve
throughout the 20s; accordingly, stability estimates are significantly lower prior to
age 30 (Costa & McCrae, 1994).
• Consequently, one must distinguish between data collected on young adults (e.g.,
college students) versus older adults in analyzing the stability of traits. Data from
young adult samples establish that positive affectivity scores are strongly stable
across short-term time spans of a few weeks to a few months, with retest correlations
typically falling in the .50 to .70 range
CAUSES AND CORRELATES OF POSITIVE
AFFECTIVITY
1. Genetic Evidence
• Positive affectivity is highly inheritable.
• Twin studies found a 0.5 median in heritability of extraversion.
2. Neurobiological Basis of Positive Affectivity
• Happy individuals tend to show relatively greater resting activity in the left
prefrontal cortex than in the right prefrontal area.
• Dysphoric individuals display relatively greater right anterior activity.
• Dopaminergic system plays a key role in both left frontal activation and
phenotypic differences in positive affectivity.
• Because of these neurobiological differences, individuals high in positive
affectivity may be more responsive to and better able to derive pleasure
from rewarding stimuli.
 DEMOGRAPHIC AND ENVIRONMENTAL CORRELATES

• An enormous literature has examined how numerous demographic variables age, gender,
marital status, ethnicity, income and socioeconomic status, and so on are related to individual
differences in happiness, life satisfaction, and trait affectivity. From these studies, it is clear that
objective demographic factors are relatively weak predictors of happiness and positive
affectivity.
• Two variables consistently have emerged as significant predictors of positive affectivity. First,
numerous studies have shown that positive affectivity is moderately correlated with various
indicators of social behavior, including number of close friends, frequency of contact with
friends and relatives, making new acquaintances, involvement in social organizations, and
overall level of social activity.
• Second, people who describe themselves as “spiritual” or “religious” report higher levels
of happiness than those who do not.
Why are spiritual and religious people happier?
• First, religion may provide people with a profound sense of meaning and purpose in their
lives, thereby supplying them with plausible answers to the basic existential questions of
life (e.g., “Why am I here?” “What will happen to me after I die?”) and delivering them
from existential angst. Second, religious activity simply may represent a particular variety
of social behavior.
BROADER SIGNIFICANCE OF THE TRAIT

Links to Psychopathology
• Low levels of positive affectivity are associated with a number of clinical
syndromes, including social phobia, agoraphobia, posttraumatic stress
disorder, schizophrenia, eating disorder, and the substance disorders
• Low positive affectivity plays a particularly salient role in the mood
disorders
JOB AND MARITAL SATISFACTION

• Individuals who are high in positive affectivity feel good about themselves
and their world. Consequently, they report greater satisfaction with
important aspects of their lives.
• Positive affectivity also is significantly correlated with marital and
relationship satisfaction.
 RAISING POSITIVE AFFECTIVITY

Is Change Possible?
• Positive affectivity levels are not highly constrained by objective life conditions. People
do not require all that much in terms of material conditions, life circumstances, and so on
—to feel cheerful, enthusiastic, and interested in life. Thus, one need not be young or
wealthy or have a glamorous, high-paying job in order to be happy.
• virtually anyone is capable of experiencing substantial levels of positive
affectivityIndeed, Diener and Diener (1996) demonstrated that most people—including
the poor and the physically handicapped—describe themselves as experiencing at least
moderate levels of positive emotionality.
• Major life events exert a significant influence on well-being only in the
short term and that people eventually adapt to them and gradually move
back to their preexisting baseline or “set point”.
• Genotypes establish the maximum and minimum phenotypic values that
are possible for a given individual; environmental factors then are free to
determine exactly where the person falls within this range. Furthermore,
unless a person already has reached his or her maximum phenotypic value.
ENHANCING POSITIVE AFFECTIVITY
1. Studies of short-term mood indicate that positive affect is more related to
action than to thought, such that it is easier to induce a state of high
positive affect through doing than through thinking.
2. Second, contemporary researchers emphasize that it is the process of
striving after goals rather than goal attainment per se that is crucial for
happiness and positive affectivity.
3. Finally, attempts at change are most likely to be successful if they are
based on a thorough understanding of these underlying mood systems.
THANK YOU
- Nimmy Johns
1st M.Sc. Psychology