Depression can make it difficult to increase the amount of positive experiences in your day to day life. To improve your sense of well-being, it is important to increase activities you find rewarding, meaningful, and valued. But how do you increase these positive experiences when you can’t think of anything that might be rewarding, meaningful, or positive?
The COPPES-R contains a series of 46 items that can help you to think of things that are do-able and that can improve your mood. Meant to be best used in collaboration with a therapist, these items can help you to discover activities that you may have found enjoyable or meaningful in the past and new activities you may want to try out and add to your schedule now. For each COPPES-R item, you’ll be asked to give two ratings. The first is for how often the activity occurred in the past month. The second is for how positive, rewarding, or valued it was, or would have been if it had happened.
Think of this exercise as a starting off point. When you can’t think of any positive experiences to add to your daily schedule, the COPPES-R along with the assistance of a licensed behavioral health provider, can be a great jumping off point to an increased sense of well-being.
The COPPES-R contains 46 items covering a broad range of simple everyday activities, such as “listening to sounds of nature.” It is not an exhaustive list, however, and was created over a decade ago. The revised version provided here has been updated.
For each COPPES-R item, you will be asked to give two ratings:
1. How often the activity occurred in the past month:
0 = not at all
1 = 1 to 6 times
2 = 7 or more times
If this seems confusing, you can reframe it this way:
0 = didn’t happen
1 = a few times, maybe once a week
2 = generally twice a week or more often, in the past month.
2. How positive, rewarding, or valued it was, or would have been if it had happened. So even if frequency = 0 (it wasn’t actually experienced), the client rates their likely level of experiencing the event as positive:
0 = not at all
1 = somewhat
2 = very much
It can be easier to do the second rating if you explain it this way:
0 = was not (or would not have been) positive if it occurred
1 = was (or would have been) somewhat positive
2 = was (or would have been) very positive.
Once you’ve completed the COPPES-R and selected the Generate Report button, a report will immediately appear below. You can either print the webpage or you can copy and paste the report in a new document. Your answers are not saved on the website and once you leave this page, your results are discarded. If you leave without saving or printing your results you will need to retake the measure.