Pandelis Perakakis

Rethinking How We Measure Affect: New Insights into Psychological Well-being

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.

Figure 1. Reconstruction of the hypothetical stability landscape of a lake using the histogram of the empirical observations of a single variable (e.g., water transparency). The system’s two distinct states are represented by basins of attraction. The depth of a basin indicates the“energy” required to reach the tipping point and transition to a different state.

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
Figure 2. Illustration of the components of a valence time series used to derive the affect shift metrics. Blue double-arrow dashed lines represent consecutive measurement occurrences within the positive affect (PA) regime, which are averaged to produce the mean and standard deviation positive residence time (mPRT and sdPRT). Similarly, a red double-arrow dashed line indicates an instance of consecutive measurement occurrences within the negative affect (NA) regime, used to calculate the mNRT and sdNRT. A blue single-arrow dashed line indicates a shift from positive to negative (P2N) affect. The total number of such shifts is divided by the total number of measurement occurrences in the PA regime to calculate the P2N affect shift ratio (P2N-ASR). The distances between two consecutive measurements when P2N shifts occur are averaged to calculate the mean and standard deviation of the P2N affect shift magnitude (mP2N-ASM and sdP2N-ASM). Likewise, a red single-arrow dashed line marks a negative to positive (N2P) shift, which is used to calculate the corresponding N2P-ASR and N2P-ASM metrics.

Why This Matters

This research opens up new possibilities for understanding and measuring psychological well-being:

  1. 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.
  2. Better Clinical Tools: These findings could lead to more accurate ways of monitoring mental health and evaluating therapeutic interventions.
  3. 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].

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