Developmental Psychology Copyright 1985 by the American Psychological Association, Inc.

J985, Vol. 2 l . N o . 3, J42-546 0012-1649/85/500.75

Age and Sex Effects for Emotional Intensity

Ed Diener, Ed Sandvik, and Randy J. Larsen
University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana

Past research has shown that younger adults and females report greater average
levels of both positive and negative affect over time. It was hypothesized that
persons in these categories are higher in emotional intensity, that is, they react
more strongly to the same level of emotional stimuli. In support of this hypothesis,
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.

women scored higher on measures reflecting emotional intensity and manifestation

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of cyclothymic symptoms, and the scores on these measures decreased through

the adult life span for both males and females. Potential reasons for the differences
in emotional intensity are discussed.

Interest in emotion has mushroomed in
recent years (e.g., see Plutchik, 1980; Strong-
man, 1978). Most work on the development
of affect has centered on children (e.g., Ci-
chetti & Hesse, 1982; Dobrowski, 1977). The
present study is an examination of age trends
in emotional intensity during the adult years.
Although early evidence tended to show that
young adults were happier than old people
(e.g., Diener, 1984; Gurin, Veroff, & Feld,
1960; Wilson, 1967), more recent evidence
has failed to uncover an age trend in happiness
(Campbell, 1981; Gaitz & Scott, 1972; Stock,
Okun, Haring, & Witter, 1983). However, an
interesting trend emerges when average levels
of positive and negative affect are measured
separately: Young persons are higher on both
(Bradbum, 1969; Braun, 1977; Campbell,
1981). Similarly, Veroff, Douvan, and Kulka
(1981) found that both feelings of zest and
worries decline through the life span.
Diener, Larsen, Levine, and Emmons (in
press-a) have postulated that a major dimen-
sion of affect within persons over time is
emotional intensity. They report evidence
showing that persons who experience strong
positive emotions are also those who show
strong negative emotions. The affect intensity
dimension of Diener et al. refers to the
strength of particular emotions when they are
experienced. This emotional intensity factor
seems to influence more specific discreet
emotions (e.g., anger) as well as global affect.
Requests for reprints should be sent to Ed Diener,
Department of Psychology, University of Illinois, 603 E.
Daniel, Champaign, Illinois 61820.
Larsen (1984b) and Larsen, Diener, and Em-
mons (in press-a) report that persons who
exhibit high affect intensity in childhood also
report more strong emotions as young adults.
However, this stability over the early life span
in affect intensity refers to stability in rank
order. In fact, it could be that individuals
change in their mean level of affect intensity
as they grow older. A general lowering of
affect intensity with age would explain the
seeming paradox that older persons experience
less of both positive and negative affect. If
emotional intensity declines over the life span,
this could explain why affect of opposite
hedonic valences moves in the same direction
over the adult life span. However, because
reports of general happiness are based on the
"affect balance" (Bradburn, 1969) between
positive and negative affect, an increase or
decrease in both types of affect may have no
effect on self-reported general happiness.
An analogous pattern has occurred for
gender. Although consistent sex differences in
general happiness or mood have not been
uncovered (Andrews & Withey, 1976; Camp-
bell, Converse, & Rodgers, 1976; Goodstein,
Zautra, & Goodhart, 1982; Gurin et al.,
1960; Olsen, 1980; Palmore & Kivett, 1977;
Sauer, 1977; Toseland & Rasch, 1979-80),
women have been found to report greater
levels of both positive and negative emotions
when these are measured separately (Braun,
1977; Cameron, 1975), although Veroff, Dou-
van, and Kulka's (1981) conclusion that
women are less happy than men is an excep-
tion to the above trends. The finding that
women report both more positive and more

542
 AFFECT INTENSITY
negative affect suggests that women might
experience more intense emotions. Women
are more frequently diagnosed as having a
bipolar affective disorder (Weissman & Kler-
man, 1977). Similar to the case of young
people, women may show elevations on both
positive and negative affect because of higher
emotional intensity, but no overall global
happiness elevations because their "affective
balance" between positive and negative affect
is similar to that of men. The purpose of the
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This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
present study was to examine both age and
sex trends in emotional intensity. Based on
past findings, it is hypothesized that females
and younger persons will report more intense
emotions.
Method
Participants and Procedures
Principal subjects were persons in the Champaign,
Illinois and Seattle, Washington areas. They and their
family members agreed to serve in a study on mood
heritability. The principal participant distributed mood
questionnaires to all members of his or her nuclear
family, and the questionnaires were mailed directly back
to us on an individual basis. The principal subject
received $10 for the family's participation. Two hundred
and forty-two subjects from 63 families were participants
in the first sample. The majority of principal participants
were college students, although secretaries and other
individuals also participated. Forty-one percent of all the
participants were high school or college students.
In each family there was at least one adopted person.
A family member contacted our research team in response
to our newspaper and bulletin board advertisements
seeking adopted persons. The entire family above age 15
completed mood reports. Thus, parents and their offspring
each completed a battery of mood scales. By gaining
participation of entire families, factors such as ethnicity
and socioeconomic status were controlled. In many past
studies, age differences can be attributed to differences
between young and older persons in economic and other
factors. Such differences in culture and extraneous de-
mographic factors are minimized by using within-family
samples. A second sample of 190 individuals from non-
adopting biological families was also tested. The principal
participants in this study were all University of Illinois
students who were enrolled in a semester-long course on
mood. These individuals, as well as their siblings and
parents, completed the AIM and GBI (see below). Un-
fortunately, in this study the specific age of respondents
was not requested. Nevertheless, participants could be
broken into two broad age categories: parents of principal
participants (older), and principal participants and their
siblings (younger). Gender information was obtained.
Subjects were instructed to complete the questionnaire
in private without consultation with other family members.
Because the key participant could be any age and of any
birth order within their family, a wide range of ages was
included in the sample.
543
Measures
There were two key measures for assessing mood
intensity. The first measure, the Affect Intensity Measure
or AIM (Larsen 1984a), has received extensive validation
and psychometric work (Larsen, 1984b; Larsen & Diener,
1984; Larsen et al., in press-a). In order to ensure brevity
in the questionnaire and hence have a high response rate,
21 items were chosen from the 40-item AIM. These
items were selected based on previous factor analytic
work and were chosen so that each component of affect
intensity was represented. The three highest loading
items on each of seven preliminary AIM factors (Larsen,
1984a) were included. Because the factors include both
positive and negative affect intensity, as well as preference
for arousal, general emotional intensity, and visceral
reactivity to emotional events, the 21-item short AIM
represents a broadband measure of affect intensity. The
AIM factors intercorrelate strongly and form a single
second-order factor. The abbreviated AIM correlated
with the full AIM at .92 {N = 176) in another sample
on whom the full AIM was available. The AIM items
inquire as to how frequently subjects experience emotions
of particular intensities in specified situations. There
were both positive and negative emotions included. For
example, items were "I can remain calm even on the
most trying days," "I would characterize my happy
moods as closer to contentment than to joy," and "My
emotions tend to be more intense than those of most
people." Note that certain items such as the first two
above were reverse keyed. Subjects responded to these
items on a 6-point scale ranging from "Never" to "Al-
ways." A subject's score was the mean response for all
items. Thus, scores could range from 1.0 to 6.0.
The AIM has received extensive empirical support of
its validity. For example, the AIM correlates with auto-
nomic peripheral measures of emotion, with other self-
report measures of intensity (Larsen, Diener, & Emmons,
in press-b), and with peer and family reports of the target
person's emotional intensity (Larsen, 1984b). The scale
does not seem to be influenced by lying, faking, or social
desirability (Larsen, 1984b). The AIM correlates at trivial
levels with general mood measures (Larsen et al,, in
press-b), which tend to measure "affect balance" or the
relative frequency of positive compared to negative affect
(Diener, 1984; Diener et ah, in press). For example, the
AIM correlates only .08 with Bradburn's (1969) Affect
Balance Scale. Because emotional intensity as measured
by the AIM tends to amplify both negative and positive
emotions, it produces no overall change in happiness
across persons. However, it should be noted that the more
intense individual will tend to be happier if happy, and
more unhappy if unhappy. Affective intensity as measured
by the AIM appears to heighten all emotions (Larsen et
al., in press-a), but is not correlated with the relative
frequency one feels negative versus positive affect (Larsen
& Diener, in press).
The second measure of affective strength is a subset of
five items selected from the General Behavioral Inventory
(GBI; Depue et al., 1981; Klein, Depue, & Slater, 1982).
This inventory assesses subsyndromal or premorbid be-
havioral characteristics indicative of a propensity to
develop bipolar affective disorder (formerly termed manic-
depression). This instrument has received validational
support (Depue et al., 1981) in terms of identifying
 544 E. DIENER, E. SANDVIK, AND R. LARSEN

Table 1
Mean Scores for Mood Intensity, Sample 1
Affective intensity measure General behavior inventory

Overall Overall
Males Females average Males Females average

Age category M N M N M N M N M N M N

Adolescence
(16-19) 4.02 25 4.51 36 4.31 61 9.36 25 10.69 35 10.13 60
Young adulthood
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(20-29) 4.05 21 4.42 37 4.29 58 9.24 21 9.89 36 9.65 yy

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Middle-aged
(30-50) 3.73 18 4.23 27 4.03 45 7.94 18 8.48 27 8.27 4b
Older middle-aged
(50-68) 3.74 37 4.17 36 3.95 73 7.50 36 8.49 35 7.99 71
Overall average 3.88 101 4.34 136 4.14 237 8.41 100 9.44 133 9.00 233

persons at risk for developing such disorders. The GBI
has been extensively validated, including correlations
with nonself-report criteria such as ratings by clinicians,
roommate ratings, clinical characteristics, and family
histories. A person scoring high on the GBI endorses
items pertaining to symptoms of mood disturbances,
particularly cyclothymia, hypomania, and depression. In
order to keep our questionnaire brief, five items were
selected based on high item-total correlations. Examples
of items selected are "Has your mood or energy shifted
rapidly back and forth from happy to sad or high to
low?" and "Have you had periods lasting several days or
more when you felt depressed or irritable, and then other
periods of several days or more when you felt extremely
high, elated, and overflowing with energy?" These items
are responded to on a scale that ranges from 1 to 4,
where 1 is labelled Never or hardly ever and 4 is labelled
Very often or almost constantly. The majority of subjects
answer with a 1 or 2 on most items. We scored the GBI
by summing across all items, thereby creating a scale on
which subjects could score from 5 to 20. The short form
of the GBI correlated .86 with the long form in a sample
of 78 college students.
Results
The short versions of the AIM and GBI
intercorrelated significantly (r = .72, p <
.001) in Sample 1, thus indicating that to
some degree they reflect the same underlying
construct but also that each measure contains
substantial unique variance not associated
with the other measure. Sample 1 means by
age and sex groups for the AIM and GBI are
shown in Table 1. The sample sizes are
slightly lower for the GBI because several
subjects failed to complete this inventory.
The main effects on the AIM for both sex,
F{\, 229) = 21.15, p < .001, and age, F(3,
229) = 3.06, p < .05, were significant, but
there was no interaction between them. For
the GBI, the sex effect was significant, F(l,
225) = 5.92, p < .05, as was the age effect,
^(3, 225) = 7.78, p < .001. Once again, the
interaction did not even approach signifi-
cance. The Pearson product-moment corre-
lation between age and the AIM score was
-.26, p < .001, and between age and the GBI
was -.32, p < .001. Although declines on
both the AIM and GBI occurred across vir-
tually all age categories, the most pronounced
drop is seen between the young adult and
middle-aged groups. This break is especially
pronounced on the GBI.
The means for Sample 2 are shown in
Table 2. As can be seen, women and younger
persons again scored higher on affect intensity.
The difference between men and women on
the AIM was significant, F(\, 186) = 28.3,
p < .001, as was the difference on the GBI,
F[it 186) = 4.86, p < .01. For age, the
differences reached significance for the GBI,
F[l9 186) « 4.67, p < .05, but were not
significant for the AIM, F{\, 186) = 2.38,
p< .15. It should be noted that the age
breakdown used in this study (parent versus
offspring) was much cruder than that used
for Sample 1. A comparison of Tables 1 and
2 also reveals that the adopting families scored
higher overall on both measures of affect
intensity. This indicates that the two samples
differ in their characteristics, although the
age and sex findings are parallel in the two
dissimilar samples.
Discussion
Although not large, there are clear age and
sex differences in emotional intensity in our
 AFFECT INTENSITY
Table 2
Mean Scores for Mood Intensity, Sample 2
Affective intensity measure
Males Females
Age category M N M N
Parents 3.11 48 3.60 50
Offspring 3.28 44 3.70 48
Overall average 3.19 92 3.65 98
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data. Women appear to be more emotionally
intense, as are subjects under age 29. Both
measures of affective intensity showed the
same pattern in both samples, even though
the samples differed in their overall affective
intensity. It should also be noted that the
findings rest on two measures of affect inten-
sity that have been extensively validated with
nonself-report criteria. The results are con-
gruent with studies on subjective well-being,
which have often found that women and
young persons report greater average levels of
both positive and negative affect.
A major question for future research is
"why?" One possibility is biological. For ex-
ample, young persons might have greater
levels of autonomic arousal. Another possi-
bility has to do with cultural expectations. It
may be that older persons are expected to be
more "mature" and less emotional, as are
men. Persons in these groups may thus
dampen their emotional responses in various
ways, whereas women and younger persons
may use strategies that amplify their emo-
tional responses. In our sample the older age
groups were comprised mostly of parents
who have offspring in college, whereas the
younger groups were largely comprised of
students. Thus, the decreasing affective inten-
sity could be due to life cycle stage rather
than biological age per se. A related possibility
is that women and younger adults are simply
more willing to admit more extreme emo-
tions. However, to the extent that men and
older persons do not admit to emotionality,
they probably actually experience less intense
emotions. It should be emphasized that the
emotional intensity measures we used are
correlated with physiological indexes, behav-
ioral measures, and reports by others. Thus,
545
General behavior inventory
Overall Overall
average Males Females average
M N M N M M N
3.36 98 8.10 50 8.90 50 8.51 98
3.50 92 8.89 44 9.63 48 9.28 92
3.43 190 8.48 92 9.26 98 8.88 190
the measures we used do not appear to be
limited to the self-report domain.
A third possible reason for the differences
found is in terms of current life experiences
and life events. For example, young people
might be exposed to more fun events, as well
as being subjected to more stressful ones.
However, Larsen, Diener, and Emmons (in
press-a) have found that individual differences
in emotional intensity cannot be attributed
entirely to differences in events. High-
emotional-intensity individuals react more
strongly than low-intensity individuals to the
very same events. Therefore, it is very uncer-
tain whether differences in life events could
be responsible for the emotional-intensity
differences found in this study.
One reason for the age differences could
be in terms of adaptation or habituation
(Brickman, Coates, & Janoff-Bulman, 1978).
As people grow older, they will more fre-
quently have been exposed to more emotional
incidents. Indeed, they will have experienced
repeated exposure to many of them. Thus,
they will be likely to be habituated to more
of the emotional events in their lives and
therefore experience less intense affect. One
last possible reason for the age trends would
be historical cohort effects. That is, persons
living in certain historical periods may ex-
perience less intense affect. Given the contin-
ual decline in emotional intensity over a 40-
year period of adulthood, one wonders
whether historical factors could be responsi-
ble. However, this possibility points up the
need for longitudinal analyses to complement
the cross-sectional findings of the present
study. All of the possible causes of affective
intensity point the way toward future research
directions.
A longitudinal study would strengthen the
 546 E. DIENER, E. SANDVIK, AND R. LARSEN
presentfindingsand help determine the causes
of differences in emotional intensity. In ad-
dition, new studies could use other types of
samples to insure that the present results
generalize to other groups. Future studies
could obtain a broader spectrum in terms of
race and socioeconomic status because the
present samples were predominantly middle-
class and white. Finally, the present results
would be extended by examining nonself-
report measures of affective intensity (e.g.,
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facial expression).
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Revision received September 23, 1984 •