Affect is involved in many psychological phenomena, but a descriptive structure, long sought, has been elusive. Valence and arousal are fundamental, and a key question-the focus of the present study-is the relationship between them. Valence is sometimes thought to be independent of arousal, but, in some studies (representing too few societies in the world) arousal was found to vary with valence. One common finding is that arousal is lowest at neutral valence and increases with both positive and negative valence: a symmetric V-shaped relationship. In the study reported here of self-reported affect during a remembered moment (N = 8,590), we tested the valence-arousal relationship in 33 societies with 25 different languages. The two most common hypotheses in the literature-independence and a symmetric V-shaped relationship-were not supported. With data of all samples pooled, arousal increased with positive but not negative valence. Valence accounted for between 5% (Finland) and 43% (China Beijing) of the variance in arousal. Although there is evidence for a structural relationship between the two, there is also a large amount of variability in this relation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

We analyzed the effects on a group of Spanish adolescents of an emotional intelligence (EI) education program based on Mayer and Salovey's (1997) model of adolescent psychosocial adjustment. Participants were 147 high school students aged between 13 and 16 years, of whom 69 were in the control group and 78 were in the training group. We conducted the research using a quasiexperimental pretest-intervention-posttest design during 2 academic years. This training program was conducted as part of the ongoing project known as INTEMO and was implemented during 10 weekly sessions of 1 hour. Students who participated in the EI program reported better psychosocial adjustment (e.g., lower levels of depression and anxiety, less atypicality, somatization, and social stress, and higher self-esteem) compared to students in the control group. Implications of these findings for educational curricula are discussed, and recommendations for future research are made.