Assessing Positive and Negative Affect via Self-Report

Abstract Affect plays a central role in human experience, providing the ongoing hedonic tone that colors the everyday lives of individuals. Not surprisingly, therefore, affect occupies an equally prominent role in the psychological and social science literature. As such, a number of different approaches exist for assessing mood and emotion. This chapter focuses on outlining and describing a variety of self-report measures that are available to affect researchers. In outlining the available means for measuring affect, we must address two central issues. First, we must be clear about the definitions of affect, emotion, and mood that will be used within this chapter. The constructs of mood and emotion are similar in that they both refer to feeling states that can be broadly characterized as pleasant or unpleasant (i.e., as positive or negative) and that reflect what is happening within the organism (Parkinson, Totterdell, Brinner, & Reynolds, 1996). It is also widely believed that they contain some common components and are controlled by similar processes (Clark & Watson, 1999; Parkinson et al., 1996).