The name is absent

The net affect-measure preserves much of the original information even after aggregation
(in particular, the strength of positive and negative emotions), but suffers from the
disadvantage any cardinal measure possesses: it is unclear what the scale of measurement
really refers to and whether different people interpret the scale in the same way. These issues
are addressed by the U-index (for “unpleasant” or “undesirable”) that does not require a
cardinal conception of individuals’ feelings. Kahneman and Krueger (2006) define the U-
index as the proportion of time in which the highest-rated feeling was a negative one. The U-
index can be computed for each individual, i.e. the fraction of a person’s waking time that is
spent in an unpleasant state, or for each activity, i.e. the fraction of the time people spend on a
specific activity that is experienced as unpleasant (Krueger et al. 2009). The U-index for
person i engaged in activity j is defined by

1 if        max{NA_i¹,...,NA_i^k,...,NA_i^K} >max{PA_i¹,...,PA_i^l,...,PA_i^L}

ijijijijijij

0 otherwise

The U-index for individual i is calculated by weighting the U-index for each activity, U_ij, by
the fraction of time the individual was engaged in that activity, h_jj :

Ui⁼∑hijUij.                                         (4)

j

The U-index for activity j is then given by

Uj=∑ ⅛√∑ hj.                    (5)

ii

According to Kahneman and Krueger (2006), the U-index has the favorable property that it
relies only on an ordinal ranking of feelings. In particular, the U-index is independent of scale
effects. If one person uses only values between 2 and 4 to characterize his feelings, while
another person uses the full scale from 0 to 6 but ranks his feelings in the same order, both
people will have the same U-index (whereas the same does not necessarily hold for net
affect).

Other authors have questioned the validity of the U-index as an ordinal measure. Layard
(2009) claims that if the assessment of feelings is truly ordinal, the U-index does not
overcome the problem that the reported strength of feelings cannot be aggregated in a
meaningful way. Suppose, for example, that two people have the same “true”, but
unobservable strengths of feelings. Both people use the 11-point-scale in different ways.

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