How Intense Are Your Emotions?
Some people feel in inches, others in miles - regardless of mood
Two people can report exactly the same average happiness and still live completely different emotional lives, because intensity is a separate trait from mood itself. One person's good day is a pleasant afternoon; another's is euphoria. Larsen and Diener's research on affect intensity treats this amplitude - how far up and down your emotions swing - as measurable on its own, independent of whether you are, overall, a happy or an unhappy person.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
Answer about how strongly you generally react to things, not about how often good or bad things happen to you.
What it measures
Three facets of affect intensity as Larsen and Diener defined it: how high positive emotions climb, how low negative emotions dip, and how quickly and how long emotional reactions run. This is about amplitude, not mood - a person can be intensely happy or intensely irritable without being either especially happy or especially irritable overall. It differs from the highly sensitive person (HSP) test on this site, which is about how much sensory and emotional input reaches you in the first place; this one is about how big the reaction is once something does.
Based on: Affect Intensity Measure (Larsen & Diener)
Possible results
Positive intensity
How high your good moods go.
Negative intensity
How low your bad moods go.
Reactivity and duration
How quickly an event moves you, and how long the feeling lingers.
Common questions
Is high emotional intensity the same as being sensitive (HSP)?
Related but not identical. Sensitivity research is mostly about how much input reaches you - noise, light, other people's moods. Affect intensity is about how big your reaction is once something does reach you. A person can register little and react hugely, or register a lot and react mildly.
Is high intensity a bad thing?
Not inherently. Larsen and Diener's research treats affect intensity as a neutral trait, present alongside how happy or unhappy someone is on average rather than causing it - what varies from person to person is how well someone has learned to manage the swings, especially the negative ones.
Can emotional intensity change over time?
It appears fairly stable as a trait, though people commonly report the same events feeling less overwhelming with practice at managing them - the amplitude of the feeling may not shrink much, but the ability to ride it out usually improves.
Sources
- Larsen, R. J., & Diener, E. (1987). Affect intensity as an individual difference characteristic: A review. Journal of Research in Personality. doi:10.1016/0092-6566(87)90023-7
- Larsen, R. J., Diener, E., & Emmons, R. A. (1986). Affect intensity and reactions to daily life events. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.51.4.803
An honest note This is Quinthea's own wording, adapted from research on affect intensity as a personality trait, so scores are not comparable to the Affect Intensity Measure's published norms, which is usually scored as one overall trait - the three bars here break down its components as the theory describes them, not as separately validated subscales. This is amplitude, not a mood disorder: intensity is stable over a lifetime and is not, on its own, a sign of anything needing treatment. It overlaps with, but is distinct from, this site's sensitivity (HSP) test.