Using and scoring the BEES
See below for more information about the BEES.
The Brief Emotional Experience Scale (BEES)
Using the BEES
Note that other response times could be chosen instead of ‘the past month’. For example, you could put ‘the past week’, ‘the past few days’, the past day’, ‘the past few hours’, or ‘right now I am feeling’.
Also note that the BEES can be used as a general measure of emotional well-being or alternatively used as a measure of emotional experience by altering the preamble to have the respondent focus on a specific event. For example, ‘During the therapy session I was feeling’, or ‘During the gym session I just did I was feeling’, etc.
Scoring the BEES
The recommended way to allocate points to the response scale is (0) Not at all (1) A little bit (2) Quite a bit (3) A lot. The BEES can be scored to provide a positive emotion score by summing across the positive adjectives (Happy, Calm, Confident) and negative score from the negative adjectives (Worried, Sad, Afraid). An overall ‘balanced’ score can also be calculated by subtracting the negative score from the positive score (i.e., positive score – negative score = balanced score). If using the recommended points for the response scale of 0-3, the positive and negative scores can range from 0 – 9. The balanced score can range from – 9 to +9.
Rogers et al. (2025) also provide a possible categorical scoring scheme for the BEES where the balanced score can be categorised as:
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BEES > +3 = Low likelihood of significant distress.
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BEES between +3 and – 1 = Moderate likelihood of significant distress.
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BEES < - 1 = High likelihood of significant distress.
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