The Contributions of Positive and Negative Affect to Emotional Well-Being

By R. Larsen. 2009

104 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this paper, the definitions of subjective well-being have been reviewed with a focus on its emotional core, which we consider to be the ratio of positive to negative affect over time. The reviewed evidence showed that negative emotions tend to be of longer duration than positive and that the NA system produces stronger emotional responses than the PA system. Also, a variety of experimental results show that negative stimuli make unique demands on cognitive resources (particularly perception and attention) compared to positive stimuli. The evidence that the negative affect system produces stronger affective output, per unit input, than the positive affect system, is a phenomenon known as negativity bias. I also went so far as to argue that negativity exceeds positivity by a factor of pi (3.14) and that efforts to speed adaptation to negative events may be more important to overall SWB then efforts to prolong responses to positive events (Larsen and Prizmic, 2008). The fact that negativity is stronger than positivity, combined with the notion of differential adaptation (people adapt faster to good events than to bad events), creates the conditions that drive the hedonic treadmill. However, most people are, to some degree, able to overcome the psychological forces of the hedonic treadmill and maintain at least a modicum of emotional well-being (Biswas-Diener, Vitterso, & Diener, 2005). It is likely that the ability called "emotional intelligence" refers in large part to the capacity to manage negative affect following unpleasant or stressful events (Larsen & Learner, 2006). Moreover, such an ability is likely to be made up of particular behaviors and strategies that each contributes specifically to the management of negative emotions (Larsen & Prizmic, 2004).

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0639a46d69aa22908a337805d0c8d53a1745d7ae

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Citations in the corpus

• A mixed-method approach to the assessment of teachers’ emotions: development and validation of the Teacher Emotion Questionnaire (2018, background): “Finally, teachers’ emotions should be related to subjective well-being, since emotional process is at the core of this construct (Larsen, 2009).”