Let’s say your cat gets trapped in the pantry overnight and manages to chew through two bags of cat nip, spread it throughout the pantry and then have a panicked pea on top of a bucket of cashews before knocking over a vase, which smashes to the ground alerting you to the fact that she’s been stuck in there all night.

Or let’s say you’re a guy who decides to eat 40 whole chickens for 40 days.

You can take those experiences and be . . . something? This episode we look into the chicken man and the cat peeing in the pantry and the scale of positive and negative experiences.

SOURCES

Diener, E., Wirtz, D., Tov, W., Kim-Prieto, C., Choi. D., Oishi, S., & Biswas-Diener, R. (In press). New measures of well-being: Flourishing and positive and negative feelings. Social Indicators Research.

https://psychologyroots.com/scale-of-positive-and-negative-experience-spane/

Schimmack, U., Diener, E., & Oishi, S. (2002). Life-satisfaction is a momentary judgment and a stable personality characteristic: The use of chronically accessible and stable sources. Journal of Personality, 70, 345-385.

Schimmack, U. & Reisenzein, R. (2002). Experiencing activation: Energetic arousal and tense arousal are not mixtures of valence and activation. Emotion, 2, 412-417

Schimmack, U., & Grob, A. (2000). Dimensional models of core affect: A quantitative comparison by means of structural equation modeling. European Journal of Personality, 14, 325-345.

Diener, E., & Biswas-Diener, R. (2008) Happiness: unlocking the mysteries of psychological wealth. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.