COMMENTARY A Critique of ‘‘Subjective wellbeing as an affective- cognitive construct’’ by Davern, Cummins and Stokes Torbjørn Moum Published online: 24 August 2007 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2007 1 Study 1 Let me first offer some comments on the affect circumplex. To what extent do results based on the affect circumplex represent the relationship between core affects in a meaningful manner when a two-dimensional model is assumed? The authors conclude from their data analyses that ‘‘... the activation factor is a poor model for the current data’’. This is a conclusion with which it is indeed hard to disagree as ‘‘sleepy, tired, exhausted, and fatigued’’ are revealed in their analyses to rank among the most ‘‘activated’’ items. One wonders why the authors continue to hold on to their circumplex model (‘‘... these results generally support the circumplex theory ...’’) in the face of such seemingly anomalous results. Previous research on the bidimensional nature of core affect on a regular basis has relied on factor analytical techniques and has struggled with similar problems, including that of finding substantial statistical overlap between the dimensions of valence and activation, which are assumed to be orthogonal. I suspect that unresolved substantive as well as purely statistical technical issues are involved. Regarding the latter, correlations arising from the very skewed distributions of many of the items (with tails in the same direction) used as input could be a major factor in producing such counterintuitive results. What we learn from Study 1 then, is basically which affective items show the strongest correlations with the statement ‘‘How satisfied are you with your life as a whole’’. This set of six ‘‘core affects’’ is subsequently reduced to three items (content, happy and excited) for somewhat nebulous reasons. In any case ‘‘core affect’’ appears to be somewhat of misnomer as we are talking about a subset of items very specifically tailormade to tap SWB (life satisfaction). ‘‘Life satisfaction affects’’ would be a more fitting label. We should keep in mind that responses to the items making up Core Affect have been elicited by the instruction ‘‘please indicate how each of the following describes your feeling when you T. Moum (&) Department of Behavioural Sciences in Medicine, Medical Faculty, University of Oslo, P.O. Box 1111, Blindern, 0317 Oslo, Norway e-mail: torbjorn.moum@medisin.uio.no 123 J Happiness Stud (2007) 8:451–453 DOI 10.1007/s10902-007-9067-0