Take the “Bittersweet“ Quiz and See Where You Fall on the Sensitivity Scale
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Grab a pen and ask yourself these questions, filling in your level of agreement on a scale from 0 (not at all) to 10 (completely). Remember there are not wrong answers!
Your Bittersweet Quiz
1.
Do you tear up easily at touching TV commercials? ______ (0-10)
2.
Are you especially moved by old photographs? ______ (0-10)
3.
Do you react intensely to music, art, or nature? ______ (0-10)
4.
Have others described you as an “old soul”? ______ (0-10)
5.
Do you find comfort or inspiration in a rainy day? ______ (0-10)
6.
Do you know what the author C.S. Lewis meant when he described joy as a “sharp, wonderful stab of longing”? ______ (0-10)
7.
Do you prefer poetry to sports (or maybe you find the poetry in sports)? ______ (0-10)
8.
Are you moved to goosebumps several times a day? ______ (0-10)
9.
Do you see “the tears in things”? (This phrase comes from Virgil’s Aeneid.) ______ (0-10)
10.
Do you feel elevated by sad music? ______ (0-10)
11.
Do you tend to see the happiness and sadness in things all at once? ______ (0-10)
12.
Do you seek out beauty in your everyday life? ______ (0-10)
13.
Does the word poignant especially resonate with you? ______ (0-10)
14.
When you have conversations with close friends, are you drawn to talking about their past or current troubles? ______ (0-10)
15.
And this: Do you feel the ecstatic is close at hand? ______ (0-10)
To score yourself, add your responses and divide that total by 15. If you scored between 0 and 3.8, you’re a cheerfully optimistic “sanguine” type! If you scored between 3.9 and 5.7, you’re beautifully balanced, able to move easily between sanguine and bittersweet states. If you scored between 5.8 and 10, you’re a true connoisseur of bittersweetness: the place where light and dark meet.
Your total score: ______
Note: While the exploratory pilot studies conducted by Yaden and Kaufman assessed preliminary aspects of the items, they didn’t yet include other ways of validating them, such as focus groups, expert review, and larger sample exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis. They encourage interested scholars to conduct more research on the survey items to further ascertain their psychometric properties.
Bittersweet
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