It seems like life satisfaction (a cognitive evaluation) and affect are simply different things, even if they are related, and have different correlates. It doesn’t strike me as that intuitively surprising that people would often evaluate their lives positively even if they experience a lot of negative affective states, in part because people care a lot about things other than their hedonic state (EAs/hedonic utilitarians may be slightly ununusual in this respect), and partly due to various biases (e.g. self-protective and self-presentation biases) that might inclined people towards positive reports.
That’s a good question. Although it somewhat depends on your purposes, there are multiple reasons why you might want to measure both separately.
Note that often affect is measured at the level of individual experiences or events, not just an overall balance. And there is evidence suggesting that negative and positive affect contribute differently to reported life satifaction. For example, germane to your earlier question, this study finds that “positive affect had strong effects on life satisfaction across the groups, whereas negative affect had weak or nonsignificant effects.”
You might also be interested in measuring negative and positive affect for other reasons. For example, you might just normatively care about negative states more than symmetrical positive states, or you might have concerns about the symmetry of the measures.
It seems like life satisfaction (a cognitive evaluation) and affect are simply different things, even if they are related, and have different correlates. It doesn’t strike me as that intuitively surprising that people would often evaluate their lives positively even if they experience a lot of negative affective states, in part because people care a lot about things other than their hedonic state (EAs/hedonic utilitarians may be slightly ununusual in this respect), and partly due to various biases (e.g. self-protective and self-presentation biases) that might inclined people towards positive reports.
Do you think it’s valuable to specifically measure negative affect instead of overall affect, in this case? Or would overall affect suffice?
That’s a good question. Although it somewhat depends on your purposes, there are multiple reasons why you might want to measure both separately.
Note that often affect is measured at the level of individual experiences or events, not just an overall balance. And there is evidence suggesting that negative and positive affect contribute differently to reported life satifaction. For example, germane to your earlier question, this study finds that “positive affect had strong effects on life satisfaction across the groups, whereas negative affect had weak or nonsignificant effects.”
You might also be interested in measuring negative and positive affect for other reasons. For example, you might just normatively care about negative states more than symmetrical positive states, or you might have concerns about the symmetry of the measures.
Thank you!