Faculty Mentor
Philip Watkins
Document Type
Poster
Publication Date
Spring 5-15-2019
Department
Psychology
Abstract
As the positive psychology movement has began to ramp up, many self-report measures have been created to research positive emotions such as gratitude, joy, and humility. While these measurements have been beneficial in giving researchers a baseline understanding into positive emotions, they are also explicit which presents the problem of self-presentation bias. We tend to view ourselves in a positive light and therefore rate ourselves more positively on self-reports. The purpose of this study was to investigate the distribution skew of commonly used positive self-report measurements for possible negative skew. We ran frequency distributions and calculated the skew of multiple measures used in five separate studies (N=900). Five measurements had a significant negative skew indicating a large proportion of participants scored the maximum or close to the maximum score on these measures: the Gratitude Questionnaire (GQ-6, skew -5 to -10), Gratitude, Resentment, and Appreciation Test (GRAT, skew -3 to -5), Gratitude Adjectives Scale (GAS, skew -3 to -5), Gratitude to God Test (GTG-T skew -2 to -3), and the Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS, skew -2 to -3). These results suggest that positive bias is an important issue in positive psychology that must be considered. We suggest controlling for self-presentation bias when analyzing results from these measure or implicit measures when available.
Recommended Citation
Hutton, Brandy R. and Barham, Max, "Positive Bias in Positive Psychology" (2019). 2019 Symposium. 19.
https://dc.ewu.edu/srcw_2019/19
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
