The Scale of Positive Experience (SPANE-P)
The Scale of Positive Experience (SPANE-P) is your personal compass for tracking joy, contentment, and engagement. The SPANE-P asks about emotional frequency: how often you genuinely feel good. This assessment focuses on the positive six feelings (like 'joyful' and 'contented') from the full SPANE scale. Taking this short, reflective tool helps you tune into your daily emotional diet, revealing your current baseline of positive affect - a vital step toward intentionally cultivating a life filled with more light.
What is this assessment?
Life is a flow of experiences, some bright and some challenging. The Scale of Positive Experience (SPANE-P) is your tool for mindfully assessing the positive feelings within that flow. Unlike cognitive scales that ask for a global judgment, the SPANE-P invites you to be present with your emotional reality over the past four weeks.
This scale is based on the powerful idea that well-being isn't just the absence of unhappiness; it's the active presence of positive emotional states. Your score will highlight the frequency of six key feelings that contribute to a rich, hedonic life.
Why Is This Assessment Valuable?
Focusing on the frequency of positive feelings helps us shift our internal narrative. Acknowledging and tracking feelings like 'joyful' and 'contented' interrupts the mind's natural bias toward negativity. Your SPANE-P score illuminates a simple truth: the more often you experience these positive states, the higher your emotional well-being. This is an actionable insight - it shows you where to direct your energy to increase your emotional fuel.
How to Approach this Assessment:
Set the Time Frame: The assessment asks you to reflect on your experiences over the past four weeks (the last month). Be honest with yourself about this recent period.
Read and Reflect: You will see a list of six positive feelings (e.g., 'Happy', 'Joyful', 'Contented'). For each one, consider how often you experienced that feeling during the last four weeks.
Use the Frequency Scale Mindfully: Choose the option that best represents the frequency of that feeling in your life during the past month.
1 = Very Rarely or Never (Almost never felt this way)
2 = Rarely (Felt this way only a few times)
3 = Sometimes (Felt this way regularly, but not consistently)
4 = Often (Felt this way frequently)
5 = Very Often or Always (Felt this way almost all the time)
Complete the Scale: Do not get stuck on any single item. Trust your intuitive summary of the past four weeks.
___ Positive
___ Good
___ Pleasant
___ Happy
___ Joyful
___ Contented
Scoring: Add the scores for all feelings. A total of 30 indicates high positive experiences, while a total of 6 indicates low positive experiences.
The Next Steps
Your SPANE-P score (which will range from 6 to 30) is a direct measure of your Positive Affect. A higher score indicates a frequent experience of pleasant feelings. If your score suggests you have fewer positive emotional experiences than you would like, this is a clear signpost! If, after taking this self-assessment tool, you realise you want more support in finding fulfilment, get in contact.
A Note of Intention (Disclaimer):
This self-assessment is designed for awareness and personal growth only. It is not a substitute for professional psychological evaluation, diagnosis, or treatment. It provides insights into your current emotional experience, which can be a valuable starting point for coaching, but it is not a clinical tool. If you are experiencing significant emotional distress, please seek help from a qualified mental health professional.
Scale developed by Diener, E., Wirtz, D., Tov, W., Kim-Prieto, C., Choi. D., Oishi, S., & Biswas-Diener, R. (2009). New measures of well-being: Flourishing and positive and negative feelings. Social Indicators Research, 39, 247-266.