Source+2

http://www.gruponem.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Carrera-Oceja-07.pdf

two emotions opposite in their valence, such as happiness and sadness, are mutually exclusive, and can be felt sequentially, but not simultaneously.

On the other hand, some researchers conceptualise theaffect system within a psychological space formed by two separate dimensions: positivity and negativity.

From this perspective, as the two dimensions are separate, two opposite emotions such as happiness (positive) and sadness (negative) can be felt either sequentially or simultaneously, depending on the circumstances.

Considering only the 6 strictly unipolar items about emotions, we found that 88 out of 150 participants (59%) marked both happiness and sadness.

Furthermore, since only 19 of our 152 participants (12.5%) marked both calm and tension, our results cannot easily be explained by acquiescence when completing the questionnaire

Therefore, these data showed that a majority of participants reported having felt happiness and sadness when they were asked to recall their ‘‘leaving high school and going to university’’ event.

When the labels and rating scales were complemented by the AES, the initial 59% of participants who reported having felt a mixed emotional experience fell significantly, to 32% of simultaneous mixed emotions.

The two rating scales for happiness and sadness showed that participants in the simultaneous condition were not more likely to report both happiness and sadness than were participants in the sequential condition

Bearing in mind that the sequential scene had a sadness happiness structure, we predicted that the AES would be sensitive to that structure

In sum, the AES revealed that the mixed emotional experience reported by participants in the sequential condition showed the predicted sadness happiness structure: most participants represented an emotional flow coherent with this structure

results suggest the existence of mixed emotional experience.

However, after controlling for some possible sources of errors (delay between presentation of the stimulus and report of the emotional experience, scale format, acquiescence, and manipulation of the presented stimuli) and including a new assessment instrument (AES), the results of the three studies consistently supported the hypothesis that the exclusive use of rating scales does not permit discrimination between different kinds of emotional experience, such as sequential and simultaneous.