Affect Balance and Total Affect versus Positive and Negative Affect as Fundamental Measures of Emotional Experience: Simple Structure is not Always So Simple 1. Valence and Arousal versus Positive and Negative Affect as Pyschological Consequences of Stress

The previous lecture notes (“Using Valence and Arousal ...”) focus on respondents’ reports of their emotional reactions to specific objects, presidential candidates. In the following sections, I examine the more typical situation in which data on emotion inventories is collected: quality of life surveys that specify no object of emotion.1 In such surveys the emotion inventories appear to be used as measures of psychological well-being along with a variety of other measures, most notably selfreported happiness (Bradburn, 1969) and life satisfaction (Campbell and Converse, 1978). In analyzing data from these surveys, I move from a focus on the global and vague concept of quality of life to a more specific, albeit equally vague, concept of stress. I use life event inventories as the source of stress (the stressors) and responses to emotion inventories as a measure of the psychological consequences of the stress produced by the life events.