Is Joy an Emotional Function of Age and Gender?

Dispositional Positive Emotion Scale (DPES), Gender, Age, Independent Sample T-test, Anova

Authors

  • Mohsin Hassan Alvi Department of Public Administration, University of Karachi, Pakistan Department of Business Administration, Federal Urdu University of Arts, Science and Technology, Pakistan Department of Research, Pakistan Institute of Living and Learning, Pakistan Department of Computer Science, Dadabhoy Institute of Higher Education, Pakistan
  • Mohammad Haris Mirza Department of Public Administration, University of Karachi, Pakistan Department of Business Administration, Federal Urdu University of Arts, Science and Technology, Pakistan
  • Midra Ikram Department of Public Administration, University of Karachi, Pakistan
  • Ameer Bux Khoso Department of Research, Pakistan Institute of Living and Learning, Pakistan
  • Amber Mukhtar Department of Computer Science, Dadabhoy Institute of Higher Education, Pakistan
October 15, 2017

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Historically, psychological researches on emotion were focused more on negative emotions. Recently, researchers have directed their attention towards positive emotion because of positive emotions is in crises throughout the globe (Fredrickson et al, 2003). So, it is an emerging field of study, many areas of which are under developed. The present research is aimed at exploring two of such areas: gender and age differences in positive emotions. Because of the suggested importance of studying discrete units of positive emotion, only one emotion i.e. joy was selected for the study. Dispositional Positive Emotion Scale-Joy sub scale was administered on 479 participants (331 men, 148 women), age ranging between 20 and 49. Following two hypotheses were generated: first, women feel lesser joy than men; and second, intensity of joy feeling varies with age.  The results were consistent with the first hypothesis. For the second hypothesis, no significant differences are found in the feeling of joy among people belonging to different age groups.