The emotion, contentment, arises from the perception of completeness in life. The current work aims to adapt and validate the Positive Emotion Assessment of Contentment Experience (PEACE) scale for Turkish language speakers. Data were collected online from two samples of Turkish adults to examine the construct validity, criterion validity, and internal consistency of the adapted scale. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses confirmed the expected single-factor structure. Furthermore, reliability tests and item analysis indicated good internal consistency (α = 0.94, ω = 0.94). All 15 items discriminated between groups with higher and lower scores. In addition, the scale has good convergent validities (CR = 0.94, AVE = 0.52) as shown by its correlations with lower affective symptoms, as well as higher unconditional self-acceptance and life satisfaction. Finally, measurement invariance was performed based on gender. Findings showed that the Turkish PEACE scale is a valid and reliable measurement instrument with strong psychometric properties, contributing to the development of diverse and inclusive cultural tools worldwide.

Contentment is an emotion felt when the present situation is perceived to be complete as it is. Six studies are presented showing the difference between contentment and other positive emotions, documenting contentment’s unique relationship with self-acceptance, and exploring the positive associations between contentment and wellbeing. First, we demonstrated that contentment is perceived as different from happiness and other positive emotions using an emotion concept mapping methodology (Study 1), a dimensional analysis (Study 2), and a free-response narrative analysis (Study 3). We then demonstrated that both trait (Study 4 and 5) and state levels (Study 6) of contentment are associated with a sense of self-acceptance, and further related to increased wellbeing. We conclude that contentment is a unique positive emotion that is central to wellbeing and life satisfaction, and we discuss important implications for future research.

The Four Pillars of Wellbeing is a social and emotional learning curriculum that promotes mindfulness, community, self-curiosity, and contentment in schools. Promising evidence for the potential impact of the Four Pillars of Wellbeing was 1st presented in a pilot study that measured the program's initial Year 1 outcomes at a kindergarten to 8th-grade private school. Prior to this analysis, teachers at the pilot school had been using this curriculum for 3 years and had completed comprehensive, end-of-year assessments on 10 well-being outcomes originally assessed in our first pilot study in 2018. After 3 years of implementation, teachers showed schoolwide increases in contentment, self-compassion, and teacher efficacy and decreases in teacher burnout compared to Year 1 baseline assessments. We also measured classroom implementation fidelity and found evidence that the extent to which teachers engaged in the Four Pillars of Wellbeing was significantly associated with increases in self-compassion and psychological well-being and decreases in burnout. Future directions and limitations of this follow-up study are also discussed.

Contentment is an emotion that arises from the perception of completeness in life. Through a series of validation studies, the purpose of this work was to develop a scale of dispositional contentment, The Positive Emotion Assessment of Contentment Experience (PEACE) Scale. The PEACE Scale demonstrated favorable psychometric properties, including single factor structure, high internal consistency (α = .93), temporal reliability (r = .86), and construct and predictive validity. Scores on the PEACE Scale were positively correlated with all Big Five personality traits except for neuroticism. Scores also correlated positively with unconditional self-acceptance, and negatively with depression, anxiety, and stress. In addition, high levels of contentment were predictive of lower materialism and greed. Potential uses of the scale are discussed.

An enduring focus in the science of emotion is the question of which psychological states are signaled in expressive behavior. Based on empirical findings from previous studies, we created photographs of facial-bodily expressions of 18 states and presented these to participants in nine cultures. In a well-validated recognition paradigm, participants matched stories of causal antecedents to one of four expressions of the same valence. All 18 facial-bodily expressions were recognized at well above chance levels. We conclude by discussing the methodological shortcomings of our study and the conceptual implications of its findings.

Recent trends in classroom climate intervention research have expressed a need for evidence-based, whole-school approaches to well-being that cultivate safer, more effective learning environments. In a single-school pilot study, we used pre- and posttest methodologies to determine the extent to which the Four Pillars of Wellbeing curriculum enhanced the well-being and emotional climate of both teachers and students at Corbett Preparatory School, a Kindergarten through 8th grade private school in Tampa, Florida. Teacher well-being was assessed along 10 positive psychological outcomes, and student mood was assessed by tracking self-reported emotions over the course of 1 school year. After completing the evidence-based well-being intervention and tracking the school for 12 months, self-compassion, teaching efficacy, and feelings of contentment increased for teachers, and use of the program practices, correlated positively with subjective well-being, self-compassion, and negatively for stress. We also found that students’ self-reported moods shifted into lower arousal positive states, which are optimal for classroom emotion regulation, focus, attention, and learning.

August 2015 – Basic Emotion Theory has proven to be a highly fruitful yet controversial set of ideas in the science of emotion, generating vigorous debate over the past 30 years (Barrett, Lindquist, & Gendron, 2007; Ekman, 1992; Ortony & Turner, 1990; Russell, 1994). At its core, Basic Emotion Theory consists of specific theses concerning (1) what the emotions are – in general terms, they are brief, unbidden, pancultural functional states that enable humans to efficiently respond to evolutionarily significant problems – and (2) how scientific research is to differentiate distinct emotions from one another – in expression, peripheral physiology, appraisal, and neural process (Ekman, 1992; Ekman & Cordaro, 2011; Ekman & Davidson, 1994).

In this chapter we review recent advances in basic emotion theory, which holds that humans have evolved a limited set of emotional expressions that serve important communicative functions within social interactions. Our review highlights recent evidence showing that a much wider array of emotions than previously thought—up to 15—have distinct displays that are recognized across different cultures. The new science of expression reveals that new modalities—tactile communication and vocalization—likewise signal a variety of emotions. Our review also brings into focus how emotions may be signaled in specific modalities, and likely sources of cultural accents in emotional expression.

We collected and Facial Action Coding System (FACS) coded over 2,600 free-response facial and body displays of 22 emotions in China, India, Japan, Korea, and the United States to test 5 hypotheses concerning universals and cultural variants in emotional expression. New techniques enabled us to identify cross-cultural core patterns of expressive behaviors for each of the 22 emotions. We also documented systematic cultural variations of expressive behaviors within each culture that were shaped by the cultural resemblance in values, and identified a gradient of universality for the 22 emotions. Our discussion focused on the science of new expressions and how the evidence from this investigation identifies the extent to which emotional displays vary across cultures.

Over the past 2 decades, a major focus in psychological research has been on pursuing happiness, positivity, and optimal human flourishing. Interestingly, little attention has been paid to contentment, which, according to over 4,000 years of spiritual, philosophical, and theoretical discourse, is an emotion that sits at the deepest core of human wellbeing and is foundational to the experience of fulfillment in life. This article synthesizes etymological, religious, philosophical, and psychological treatments of contentment from multiple languages and traditions. Derived from these perspectives, it also presents a prototype approach to contentment, its core affect features and cross-cultural variations. Finally, it presents theory-grounded hypotheses intended to initiate future research on the topic. We propose a primary appraisal theme that is at the root of all experiences of contentment: perceived completeness, which refers to the perception that the present situation is enough and entire.

With data from 10 different globalized cultures and 1 remote, isolated village in Bhutan, we examined universals and cultural variations in the recognition of 16 nonverbal emotional vocalizations. College students in 10 nations (Study 1) and villagers in remote Bhutan (Study 2) were asked to match emotional vocalizations to 1-sentence stories of the same valence. Guided by previous conceptualizations of recognition accuracy, across both studies, 7 of the 16 vocal burst stimuli were found to have strong or very strong recognition in all 11 cultures, 6 vocal bursts were found to have moderate recognition, and 4 were not universally recognized. All vocal burst stimuli varied significantly in terms of the degree to which they were recognized across the 11 cultures. Our discussion focuses on the implications of these results for current debates concerning the emotion conveyed in the voice.

Universals and Cultural Variations in Emotional Expression

One of the most fascinating characteristics of emotions is that they have universal expressive patterns. These expressions, which are encoded through multiple bodily channels, allow us to identify distinct emotions in ourselves and others. After groundbreaking theorizing by Charles Darwin and early empirical work by Ekman and Izard, further research in emotion science revealed evidence in single cultures for more emotional expressions above and beyond the well-studied set comprising of anger, contempt, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. Some of these new emotions were displayed using nonfacial modalities, such as the voice, touch, and posture. Following the logic set forth by these methods and findings, we tested two hypotheses: 1) there are more than seven universal expressions of emotion; 2) expressive universality is not limited to facial expression.Findings from three cross-cultural experimental studies yielded support to the above hypotheses. Our first study collected 5500 expressions of twenty-one emotions from five different cultures. Spontaneous behavioral analysis revealed core facial and bodily patterns for each of the 21 states across all five cultures. Additionally, we uncovered over 100 cultural variations to the universal patterns and hundreds of individual variations. We concluded from this study that there exist new potential universal expressions above and beyond the well-studied emotions. In a second study, we found that these core patterns were reliably decoded by naive raters in 10 different countries. In this experiment, non-American participants rated the expressions of American actor-posed stills and acoustic recordings. We concluded that the new expressions were recognized universally and were reliably distinguished from the well-studied emotions anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. Furthermore, nonverbal acoustic expressions of emotion were universally recognized at rates comparable to or greater than facial expression.

Emotions are discrete, automatic responses to universally shared, culture-specific and individual-specific events. The emotion terms, such as anger, fear, etcetera, denote a family of related states sharing at least 12 characteristics, which distinguish one emotion family from another, as well as from other affective states. These affective responses are preprogrammed and involuntary, but are also shaped by life experiences.