Most research on psychological well-being focuses on specific emotions – asking people how happy, sad, angry, or excited they feel. However, underlying these distinct emotions is something more fundamental: affect, or the basic sense of feeling good or bad. In our recent study published in Emotion, we took a direct approach to understanding this core aspect of human experience, revealing fascinating patterns about how our affective states fluctuate over time and what these patterns tell us about psychological well-being.
The Lake Analogy: Understanding Affective States
Imagine a lake that can exist in two states: turbid (murky) or clear. The lake doesn’t randomly flutter between these states – it tends to stay in one state until enough external forces push it to “tip” into the other state (see Figure 1). This is called bistability, and we found that human affect often works in a surprisingly similar way.

What We Discovered
Our research revealed two key findings that challenge traditional ways of thinking about affect:
1. Affect Is Often Bistable
Most people (approximately 54% in our studies) regularly switch between distinct positive and negative affective states, rather than floating somewhere in between. This pattern, which we call “bistable affective behavior,” is therefore very common in healthy adults. Just as our metaphorical lake has two distinct states, many people tend to settle into either positive or negative affective states, with relatively abrupt transitions between them.
2. It’s Not About How Strongly You Feel – It’s About How You Switch Between States
Traditionally, researchers have focused on measuring the intensity of positive and negative emotions and then inferring affect from these measurements. We took a different approach: we simply asked people “How do you feel right now?” on a scale from negative to positive. Remarkably, we found that what really matters for psychological well-being isn’t how intensely you feel, but how often you transition between positive and negative states. Specifically, the ratio of positive-to-negative transitions tells us more about a person’s well-being than how intense their feelings are.
How We Measured This
Our approach was straightforward. Instead of asking about specific emotions, we tracked people’s overall affective state over time with a single question: “How do you feel right now?” (rated from very bad to very good). From these time series (see Figure 1), we tracked:
- How often people switched from negative to positive affect (and vice versa)
- How long they stayed in each affective state
- The magnitude of these affective shifts

Why This Matters
This research opens up new possibilities for understanding and measuring psychological well-being:
- Simpler Measurement: Instead of complex emotional questionnaires, we might be able to assess well-being by simply tracking how people shift between feeling good and bad.
- Better Clinical Tools: These findings could lead to more accurate ways of monitoring mental health and evaluating therapeutic interventions.
- Understanding Resilience: The ability to transition from negative to positive affective states might be a key indicator of psychological resilience.
Looking Forward
These findings suggest that psychological well-being is about maintaining a healthy pattern of affective transitions – being able to bounce back to positive states when life inevitably pulls us into negative ones.
For those interested in the technical details, you can find our full paper in Emotion [DOI: 10.1037/emo0001454] or access the open version on PsyArXiv [DOI: 10.31234/osf.io/cqpuz].