On Mondays, I publish my deep-dive column, The Pursuit of Happiness.
Positive and negative emotions are not opposites.
They are two separate systems, processed in different hemispheres of your brain.
You can have a lot of both. A little of both. A lot of one and a little of the other.
Your PANAS results help you understand how intensely you experience positive and negative emotions, and play to your strengths.
Why this matters
Your two scores are the first piece of a much larger picture.
Knowing whether your positive affect runs high or low, and whether your negative affect runs high or low, is genuinely useful self-knowledge. It is the foundation that the rest of your emotional life is built on. It is also the opening question, not the answer.
Two scores grounded in four decades of peer-reviewed research
A vivid, plain-English read on what your emotional wiring feels like
An honest look at the
gifts and costs for your particular wiring
A clearer sense of why you experience the world the way you do
Not bad...
For five minutes of your afternoon
What the quiz is, and what it isn't