The Positive and Negative Affect Scale (PANAS) Test Battery is a 20-item self-evaluation questionnaire that measures affects, or indicators of emotional stress. Emotional states are important to study during situations of isolation and confinement like bed rest experiments because they reflect the general state of the person at one step of the experiment. The PANAS test battery is one of three Standard Measures (SM) test batteries conducted at Russia’s Institute for Biomedical Problems’ (IBMP) Nazemnyy eksperimental’nyy kompleks (NEK) facility. The purpose of the standard measures project is to populate a repository with data that enables high-level monitoring of countermeasure effectiveness and meaningful interpretation of health and performance outcomes. The NEK standard measures will support future, hypothesis-driven research that enables planetary missions by providing an optimized minimal set of measures captured from subjects. These measures will be available to other studies under data sharing agreements as well as undergo analysis to understand risk posture.

The PANAS separately assesses positive and negative affects. A positive affect reflects the extent to which a person feels enthusiastic, active, and alert. A person displaying high-positive affect has high energy, full concentration, and pleasurable engagement while a low-positive affect is characterized by sadness and lethargy. The separate measure of negative affect reflects the degree to which a person feels subjective distress and unpleasant engagement. A high-negative affect is described by anger, contempt, disgust, guilt, fear, and nervousness while a low-negative affect is described by a state of calmness and serenity.

++ -- View more