Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS-SF)

What is the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS-SF)?

The is one of the most widely used psychological assessments. It was designed to help healthcare professionals assess a person’s experiences with positive and negative emotions in terms of how often they experience them in a week.

This particular assessment comes in the form of an easy-to-answer checklist. It consists of twenty items, which is essentially just a list of the following emotions:

How to use the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS-SF)

Using this tool, as stated earlier, is quite easy! If you are a healthcare professional, the first thing you need to do is issue this to people, whether you are doing it for research purposes or therapy-related reasons.

You can issue this in two ways:

1. You can conduct it as an interview or part of a therapy or counseling session. This is a good way to administer this test because you will have the opportunity to gauge the person from various angles, such as examining their personalities and dispositions.

If you opt for this approach, you must tell them the possible answers they can give for each emotion.

2. You can simply hand them a copy of the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS-SF), whether physically or digitally.

Whichever approach you decide to take, the person answering simply needs to pick one of five set answers for each emotion:

• Very slightly or not at all
• A little
• Moderately
• Quite a bit
• Extremely

Their pick must be based on how often they felt a particular emotion in the past week. To indicate their answers, either you or the person just needs to tick the corresponding checkboxes for their answers.

How do you score the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS-SF)?

Scoring the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS-SF) is as easy as answering it.

Each answer corresponds to a particular score:

• Very slightly or not at all = 1
• A little = 2
• Moderately = 3
• Quite a bit = 4
• Extremely = 5

When calculating the scores, you will be dividing them into two sections: positive and negative. Each section has a maximum score of 50.

The positive section includes numbers 1, 3, 5, 9, 10, 12, 14, 16, 17, and 19.

The negative section includes numbers 2, 4, 6, 7, 8, 11, 13, 15, 18, and 20.

Just add up the scores for both!

As for what you will do with those scores, well, that depends on you. There are no score ranges and designations to refer to, so your decisions will be based on what exactly it is you are using this assessment for. Are you using it as part of your research? Are you using it as part of a therapy or counseling program? The following steps and how you interpret the results will be up to you.

When is the best time to use the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS-SF)?

This will depend on you. Are you a healthcare professional that is using this for research purposes? Or are you a therapist, counselor, or psychologist using it for your sessions with patients?

As stated earlier in this guide, the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS-SF) is often used in research settings. If you are a researcher and your topic involves positive and negative emotions, you might want to use this assessment to support your thesis or antithesis. Once you have a target population for your research, issue this to them.

This tool can also be used in a clinical setting to assess patients and how often they experience certain emotions. Of course, given the nature of this assessment as a simple checklist with a rating range, this is simply one way of evaluating a patient. It is not enough on its own to determine what goes into a person’s treatment plan.

If a clinical professional is using this, it can be used in such a way as to determine how often their patient experiences certain emotions (especially negative ones). There will come a time during a therapy/counseling program when the professional needs to get certain bits of information from their patient, so using this assessment is one way to get the ball rolling.

They can use their answers as a jumping point to investigate why they experience said emotions frequently in the first place. Did they go through something traumatic? Are they facing troubles at home, school, or work? These are just two of the questions you can ask, especially to your patient, to get more information that will help you find ways to provide the best treatment possible for them.

Who can use the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS-SF)?

The Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS-SF) can be used by numerous healthcare professionals. It’s not strictly for certain professionals, but it is best if the people using this are trained in administering psychological assessments and other related tools. They should also be well-versed in interpreting the results of this assessment.

In the research context, this assessment is commonly used by psychometricians and the like for studies related to emotions, affect, and their relationship with other psychological variables and concepts.

In clinical settings, the following healthcare professionals will likely have this as part of their roster of assessments and related tools:

• Psychologists
• Psychiatrists
• (Mental Health) Therapists
• Counselors
• Nurses

For those looking to use this in a clinical setting, you may use this tool as part of a diagnostic process. This assessment doesn’t have score ranges, designations, or any suggested directives for any score result, so it’s best to always include this as part of a comprehensive examination. The answers in this assessment can help professionals formulate questions they can ask their patients in subsequent sessions, which can lead to having them provide answers, and in turn, open up more perspectives to consider to cover more ground.

What are the benefits of using the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS-SF)?

It’s a versatile and inexpensive tool to use.

This particular assessment does not require any special equipment. You can simply print it and have someone answer it on the spot with a pen, or you can issue it online (this version, at least). It can even be used on any population, too.

This assessment is also easy to accomplish. The answers are already set for the whole sheet, and it’s up to the person answering to pick which ratings best apply to them in the context of how they felt the previous week before engaging with the assessment. Given that, it should only take a few minutes to finish.

It can be used to assist professionals with their research.

As stated earlier, the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS-SF) is often used in research settings. So long as emotions and affect are involved, this can help with adding perspective, especially when the topic covers other psychological variables. An example would be how stress heavily impacts the experience of positive emotions or how it amplifies negative ones.

It can be used as a monitoring tool.

While we mentioned earlier that the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS-SF) may not necessarily be an effective standalone tool to properly examine a patient or be the sole catalyst of a treatment plan, it can definitely be used to ground therapy/counseling discussions, as well as add a perspective that could help with assessing other mental health issues that this assessment doesn’t cover.

It can also be used to monitor patients. Let’s say that a treatment plan has already been developed and implemented. You can reuse this tool to check for any changes in their experiences with positive and negative emotions as a result of the treatment.