What is Positive Affect and Why it is Part of our Happiness?

Among the four aspects of happiness as shown in the graph below and explained in another post, it is more intuitively to focus first on Positive Affect (commonly called positive feelings or positive emotions), as it is what most people identify as happiness.

So, we can start from that to “systemically” improve our happiness.

First of all, why it is called positive affect, instead of “positive feelings” or “positive emotions” as everybody knows about? There are good reasons for that, include:

1. Although everybody knows about the latter two, everybody might have a more or less different idea about each, based on personal experiences and perceptions. Some might see them as the fleeing, momentary good feelings, some even narrow them to sensory pleasures, and many consider them the same as happiness. A scientific concept needs to be clearly defined, unambiguous, and distinct from other concepts. So, naming it Positive Affect may avoid confusion with the often-fuzzy ideas about positive feelings or positive emotions.

2. Many people equate positive feelings/emotions with happiness. However, happiness in psychology and other well-being sciences is defined differently, and broader, than positive feelings/positive emotions - Happiness includes positive feelings/emotions, but also includes more long-lasting, cognitive aspects collectively named Life Satisfaction. See a detailed decapitation of this definition of happiness in another post. But briefly, the life satisfaction part of happiness is the cognitive part which involves how we cognitively EVALUATE our life (e.g., “When I think about it, I can say overall I have a happy life”), while the feelings/emotions part is the “affective” part of happiness, involving how we FEEL (e.g., “I am feeling happy”).

Thus, the “how we feel” part, positive or negative, is scientifically named “Affect” (“Positive Affect”, or “Negative Affect”, respectively, as shown in the above graph).

With the concept clarified, now let’s go back to enhancing positive affect for building happiness. There are a number of methods, validated by research to be effective, for increasing positive affect, and in turn increasing happiness. Some practical ones will be introduced in this substack over the next period of time.

Before learning about and practicing these methods, I would encourage everyone to take an assessment of your current level of positive affect, which is provided for free to our subscribers (including free subscribers, by request).

In addition to getting a measurement of your current level of positive affect, you will also receive a detailed, personalized analysis of the results in private, all for free.

This assessment will serve as your “baseline” level, then after learning and practicing the methods that will be introduced here or through private coaching, for a certain period of time (such as three months), you can take an assessment again (also for free here for subscribers), to see, in hard data, how your positive affect, or happiness in general, increases!

(Beside Positive Affect assessments, our subscribers also have access to assessments of a host of other well-being indicators, as well as professional one-on-one coaching for building up your well-being and happiness in different aspects of your life.)