Full text
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| Author(s): |
Juliana Teixeira Fiquer
Total Authors: 1
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| Document type: | Master's Dissertation |
| Press: | São Paulo. |
| Institution: | Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Instituto de Psicologia (IP/SBD) |
| Defense date: | 2006-07-31 |
| Examining board members: |
Emma Otta;
Vera Silvia Raad Bussab;
Renata Plaza Teixeira
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| Advisor: | Emma Otta |
| Abstract | |
The objective of Study 1 is the comparison of reports of positive and negative affects presented by men and women belonging different age groups (young, adult, middle-aged and elderly) and different locations. People from four brazilian cities were subjected to a questionnaire the Positive and Negative Affect Scale (PANAS) and the results were analyzed through ANOVA. The resulting sample is composed of a mixture of questionnaires answered by 84 people from São Paulo-SP, 80 people from João Pessoa-PB, 85 people from Socorro-SP, and 82 people from Salvador-BA. We have found city and age to be of high relevance to both positive and negative affect levels. The inhabitants of São Paulo scored lower with respect to positive affects than the inhabitants of the other three cities. The inhabitants of São Paulo also scored higher in negative affects than the inhabitants of Socorro. Elderly people scored higher in positive affects and lower in negative affects than both adults and young people. Lastly, we found an interaction between sex and age. Adult women reported larger quantities of negative affects than men of the same age. Elderly women, on the other hand, scored higher with respect to positive affects than men at that same age. The observed results are in accordance with what is predicted by the socioemotional selectivity theory, which dictates that well-being increases with age due to changes that favor emotional stability. Our research shows that the effects of gender on positive and relative affect reports are also related to age. The maternity vs. job conflict represents an important source of stress that may have contributed to these results. The objective of Study 2 is to check whether Social Desirability (SD) can replicate the patterns of results that we obtained for PANAS in Study 1. To that extent, we applied the Social Desirability Scale of Crowne and Marlowe (1960) to a randomly selected sample of 115 individuals with sex and age distributions that resembled the distributions of our first study. We found evidence that SD scores were related to age, with elderly people reporting higher scores of SD than younger people. However, we found no statistically relevant evidence that gender could influence SD scores. This data points toward the fact that the results we observed in Study 1 cannot be completely explained by SD influence. The objective of Study 3 is to compare reports of positive and negative affects in depressive and non-depressive individuals. The clinical sample is composed of middle-aged men and women (14 men and 27 women) who had been previously diagnosed with Major Depression. The non-clinical sample was the same we used in Study 1, which is also composed of middle-aged men and women who reside in the city of São Paulo. Individuals belonging to the depression group scored higher and lower with respect to negative and positive affects, respectively, than the individuals belonging to the non-depressive group. We were able to establish that PANAS is indeed an adequate instrument for distinguishing between depressive and non-depressive emotional states. (AU) | |