PANAS Norms in a Thousand UK Adults (Crawford & Henry, 2004)

The Question

Does the two-factor structure of the PANAS hold up in a large general-population adult sample, and what scores should we expect from a typical adult?

What They Found

• The two-factor structure originally reported by Watson, Clark & Tellegen, 1988 replicated cleanly: positive and negative affect emerged as separate, weakly correlated factors in this much larger and older sample
• Internal reliability matched the original: Cronbach's alpha was 0.89 for Positive Affect and 0.85 for Negative Affect, holding up across age, sex, and education
• The general-adult population means landed at PA around 31 and NA around 16, close to the 1988 student-sample numbers and now used as the reference point in clinical and research work
• PA and NA correlated around -0.20, the same near-zero relationship Watson, Clark and Tellegen found, ruling out the single bipolar dimension that older mood scales assumed
• Older adults showed slightly lower negative affect than younger adults at every age band, consistent with the broader literature on emotional regulation improving with age

How They Tested It

• Recruited 1,003 adults across the UK, sampled to match census distributions on age, sex, and region; this was the first large general-population PANAS validation outside North America
• Each participant completed the standard 20-item PANAS with the past-few-weeks recall window
• Ran confirmatory factor analysis to test the two-factor structure against alternative models (single factor, three factor, hierarchical)
• Computed normative tables broken down by age band and sex so clinicians could compare any individual score against a matched reference group

Caveats

• The sample was UK-only; it confirms the PANAS works in a Western adult population but does not address how the structure travels to non-Western cultures
• The recall window used was “past few weeks”, so the norms published here should not be applied verbatim to the more common one-week or right-now PANAS instructions without adjustment
• Self-selection bias remains: people who agree to fill in mood questionnaires may differ in mood from those who decline, even with careful demographic matching

How Reborn Helps

Reborn shows your PANAS result against the Crawford & Henry adult population means, so you see exactly where your week sits relative to a typical adult.