New Well-being Measures: Short Scales to Assess Flourishing and Positive and Negative Feelings

Measures of well-being were created to assess psychological flourishing and feelings—positive feelings, negative feelings, and the difference between the two. The scales were evaluated in a sample of 689 college students from six locations. The Flourishing Scale is a brief 8-item summary measure of the respondent’s self-perceived success in important areas such as relationships, self-esteem, purpose, and optimism. The scale provides a single psychological well-being score. The measure has good psychometric properties, and is strongly associated with other psychological well-being scales. The Scale of Positive and Negative Experience produces a score for positive feelings (6 items), a score for negative feelings (6 items), and the two can be combined to create a balance score. This 12-item brief scale has a number of desirable features compared to earlier measures of positive and negative emotions. In particular, the scale assesses with a few E. Diener (&) Department of Psychology, University of Illinois, 603 E. Daniel Street, Champaign, IL 61820, USA e-mail: [email protected] E. Diener The Gallup Organization, Omaha, NE, USA D. Wirtz East Carolina University, Greenville, NC, USA W. Tov Singapore Management University, Bras Basah, Singapore C. Kim-Prieto College of New Jersey, Ewing, NJ, USA D. Choi California State University, East Bay, Hayward, CA, USA S. Oishi University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA R. Biswas-Diener Center for Applied Positive Psychology, Milwaukie, OR, USA 123 Soc Indic Res (2010) 97:143–156 DOI 10.1007/s11205-009-9493-y