A premature consensus: Are happiness and sadness truly opposite affects?

Within the debate on the structure of affect, a consensus began emerging in the last decade regarding the bipolarity of happiness-sadness. We argue that this consensus is premature. Focusing on the psychometrics of momentary affect, particularly happiness and sadness, and using a simulation study, a large-scale data set, and 2 experiments manipulating affect, we plot a map of affective space that departs from the consensus. One key departure is the finding that happiness and sadness are not bipolar opposites. Another is that nonuniform skewness plays a major role in studies of affective structure, but can be addressed with appropriate analyses.