A psychometric validation study of the positivity self-test in Portuguese organizational context

Abstract

The aim of this study was to assess the psychometric validation of the Positivity Self-Test (PS-T, Fredrickson 2009) in Portuguese organizational context with a total of 629 participants. The Broaden-and- Build Theory considers Positive Emotions as markers of flourishing, of optimal well-being (Fredrickson, 1998, 2001). The ratio of positivity based in PS-T, allows us to know how much persons experience positive emotions in relation to negative emotions in a period of time, and well-being can be related with the value of this Ratio. Using a modification of Izard’s scale, Fredrickson first developed a short version of actual Positivity Self-Test (Fredrickson, 2009), to measure how often people experienced positive and negative emotions thinking back to the September 11th attacks. It is an ordinal scale comprising 20 items, where items are divided in two equal parts with positive and negative emotions, so that the participant should put the intensity with which the experienced, and the Likert response format consisting of five points between 0 ("nothing") and 4 ("very").The test reveals good psychometric properties in Portuguese context, including reliability, convergent and discriminant validity. The PS-T correlates positively as expected with affective well-being measure by the Multi-Affect Indicator and negatively with the Perceived Stress Scale.