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In intensive longitudinal research, researchers typically consider the structure of affect to be stable across individuals and contexts. Based on an assumed theoretical structure (e.g., one bipolar or two separate positive and negative affect constructs), researchers create affect scores from items (e.g., sum or factor scores) and use them to examine the dynamics therein. However, researchers usually ignore that the affect structure itself is dynamic and varies across individuals and contexts. Understanding these dynamics provides valuable insights into individuals' affective experiences. This study uses latent Markov factor analysis (LMFA) to study what affect structures underlie individuals' responses, how individuals transition between structures, and whether their individual transition patterns differ. Moreover, we explore whether the intensity of negative events and the personality trait neuroticism relate to momentary transitions and individual differences in transition patterns, respectively. Applying LMFA to experience sampling data ( N = 153; age: mean = 22; SD = 7.1; range = 17-66), we identified two affect structures-one with three and one with four dimensions. The main difference was the presence of negative emotionality, and the affect dimensions became more inversely related when the affect structure included negative emotionality. Moreover, we identified three latent subgroups that differed in their transition patterns. Higher negative event intensity increased the probability of adopting an affect structure with negative emotionality. However, neuroticism was unrelated to subgroup-membership. Summarized, we propose a way to incorporate contextual and individual differences in affect structure, contributing to advancing the theoretical basis of affect dynamics research. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Research on emotion dynamics as indices of emotion functioning has become muddled by conceptual confusion, methodological heterogeneity, and seemingly conflicting results. One way to address this chaos is the study of profiles of emotion dynamics across 12 emotions and how they differ between 246 adolescents. The interpretation of these dynamic profiles was guided by auxiliary variables including age, personality, depressive symptoms, and social experiences. During 6 days, 246 adolescents ( M age = 14.20; 65% female) rated nine times daily the intensity of 12 emotions (cheerful, happy, energetic, joyful, content, relaxed, anxious, worried, irritable, insecure, down, and guilty) and their social experiences with family, friends, and classmates. Additional baseline measures included neuroticism, extraversion (Revised Junior Eysenck Personality Questionnaire Short Form), and depressive symptoms (Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale). A three-mode principal component analysis (3MPCA Tucker3-based) model was estimated on the person-specific dynamic parameters of emotional intensity (mean), variability (standard deviation), instability (mean squared successive difference), and inertia (autocorrelation). The 3MPCA identified three emotion-mode components (positive affect, negative affect, and irritability) and three dynamic-mode components (emotional intensity, lability, and inertia). Five individual-mode components captured interactions between these modes, of which positive affect explained most variation in the data. These emotion dynamic profiles correlated differently with social experiences. Additional 3MPCA model structures based on imputed data (correcting missing autocorrelations) and affect scale composites (low- and high-arousal positive and negative affect) showed strong resemblance. The identified emotion dynamic profiles capture meaningful interpersonal differences in adolescents' emotional experiences and change. Future work should focus on irritability and positive affect as these were uniquely informative in adolescents' emotional experiences. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Affect is involved in many psychological phenomena, but a descriptive structure, long sought, has been elusive. Valence and arousal are fundamental, and a key question-the focus of the present study-is the relationship between them. Valence is sometimes thought to be independent of arousal, but, in some studies (representing too few societies in the world) arousal was found to vary with valence. One common finding is that arousal is lowest at neutral valence and increases with both positive and negative valence: a symmetric V-shaped relationship. In the study reported here of self-reported affect during a remembered moment ( N = 8,590), we tested the valence-arousal relationship in 33 societies with 25 different languages. The two most common hypotheses in the literature-independence and a symmetric V-shaped relationship-were not supported. With data of all samples pooled, arousal increased with positive but not negative valence. Valence accounted for between 5% (Finland) and 43% (China Beijing) of the variance in arousal. Although there is evidence for a structural relationship between the two, there is also a large amount of variability in this relation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Recent theory conceptualizes emotion regulation as occurring across three stages: (a) identifying the need to regulate, (b) selecting a strategy, and (c) implementing that strategy to modify emotions. Yet, measurement of emotion regulation has not kept pace with these theoretical advances. In particular, widely used global self-report questionnaires are often assumed to index people's typical strategy selection tendencies. However, it is unclear how well global self-reports capture individual differences in strategy selection and/or whether they may also index other emotion regulation stages. To address this issue, we examined how global self-report measures correspond with the three stages of emotion regulation as modeled using daily life data. We analyzed data from nine daily diary and experience sampling studies (total N = 1,097), in which participants provided daily and global self-reports of cognitive reappraisal, expressive suppression, and rumination. We found only weak-to-moderate correlations between global self-reports and average daily self-reports of each regulation strategy (indexing strategy selection). Global self-reports also correlated with individual differences in the degree to which (a) preceding affect experience predicted regulation strategies (representing the identification stage), and (b) regulation strategies predicted subsequent changes in affective experience (representing the implementation stage). Our findings suggest that global self-report measures of reappraisal, suppression, and rumination may not strongly and uniquely correlate with individual differences in daily selection of these strategies. Moreover, global self-report measures may also index individual differences in the perceived need to regulate, and the affective consequences of regulation in daily life. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Emotion regulation (ER) repertoire-the range of different ER strategies an individual utilizes across situations-is assumed to enable more adaptive ER and greater well-being. ER repertoire has been operationalized by a quantitative index (sum of ER strategies across situations) or by applying a person-centered approach to global self-reports of dispositional ER. We aimed to assess ER repertoire in daily life by using an experience sampling methodology (ESM) and a person-centered approach that could account for nested data. We used multilevel latent profile analyses of ESM data ( N = 179, 9-10 prompts per day over 21 days) to (a) group the occasions into latent profiles of momentary ER strategies, (b) group individuals whose distributions of ER profiles differed across occasions into latent classes, and (c) examine well-being correlates of class membership at the person level. At the occasion level, we identified nine ER profiles that differed in degree of use (e.g., no use of any vs. strong use of all strategies) and in specific combinations of strategies (e.g., situation selection and acceptance vs. suppression and ignoring). At the person level, we identified 5 classes of individuals differing in the degree to which they used various momentary ER profiles versus one predominant profile across situations. Well-being was highest for individuals who used multiple ER profiles of active strategies and lowest for individuals who used ER profiles focused on suppression. Hence, both ER repertoire width and the specific make-up of the ER repertoire were relevant for the relation between ER repertoire and well-being. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Within the study of emotions, researchers have increasingly stressed the importance of studying individual differences in emotion dynamics and emotional responding and the way these relate to more stable differences in well-being. However, there is no clear picture regarding affective reactivity to positive events and how different emotional reactions relate to differences in well-being, particularly higher levels of well-being. Theoretical work and empirical findings from different lines of research (e.g., clinical studies, aging literature, positive and personality psychology) support either of 2 predictions: Higher well-being is related to an enhanced or reduced affective reactivity to positive events in daily life. Testing these opposing predictions, we examined global well-being and affective reactivity to daily positive events in 6 studies using the experience-sampling or daily diary method (Ns = 70, 66, 95, 200, 76, and 101). Global well-being was measured with various indicators and a well-being composite score. Across the majority of studies, we found that higher global well-being was associated with reduced affective reactivity to positive events in daily life, as shown by smaller decreases in momentary negative affect. In 3 of the 6 studies, higher well-being composite scores were also associated with smaller increases in momentary positive affect. These findings seem to suggest that people with higher global well-being profit less from the joy of a positive event they experience in daily life. Instead, for people with lower well-being, positive events might be a meaningful way to brighten one's momentary mood. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Emotion regulation (ER) strategies are often categorized as universally adaptive or maladaptive. However, it has recently been proposed that this view is overly simplistic: instead, adaptive ER involves applying strategies variably to meet contextual demands. Using data from four experience-sampling studies (Ns = 70, 95, 200, and 179), we tested the relationship between ER variability and negative affect (NA) in everyday life. The constantly changing demands of daily life provide a more ecologically valid context in which to test the role of variability. We calculated 2 global indicators of variability: within-strategy variability (of particular strategies across time) and between-strategy variability (across strategies at one time-point). Associations between within-strategy variability and NA were inconsistent. In contrast, when controlling for mean strategy endorsement, between-strategy variability was associated with reduced NA across both individuals and measurement occasions. This is the first evidence that variably choosing between different strategies within a situation may be adaptive in daily life. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Research has shown that how well people can differentiate between different emotional states is an essential requirement for adaptive emotion regulation. People with low levels of emotion differentiation tend to be more vulnerable to develop emotional disorders. Although we know quite a lot about the correlates of emotion differentiation, research on factors or interventions which could improve emotion differentiation skills is scarce. Here, we hypothesize, and study empirically, whether a mindfulness-based intervention (MBI) may impact the differentiation of negative and positive emotions. A within-subjects pre-, post-, and follow-up design involving experience sampling was used. At each phase participants reported their current emotions and mindfulness skills up to 40 times across 4 consecutive days using smartphones. Multilevel modeling showed a significant improvement in negative emotion differentiation postintervention and at 4 months of follow-up, and a significant improvement in positive emotion differentiation at 4 months follow-up. The improvement in negative emotion differentiation, however, was no longer significant when controlling for levels of negative affect. A time-lagged mediation model showed that posttreatment changes in mindfulness skills mediated subsequent changes in negative emotion differentiation, also when controlling for levels of negative affect. These results suggest that MBI is a promising approach to improve people's emotion differentiation skills. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

In emotion dynamic research, one distinguishes various elementary emotion dynamic features, which are studied using intensive longitudinal data. Typically, each emotion dynamic feature is quantified separately, which hampers the study of relationships between various features. Further, the length of the observed time series in emotion research is limited and often suffers from a high percentage of missing values. In this article, we propose a vector autoregressive Bayesian dynamic model that is useful for emotion dynamic research. The model encompasses 6 elementary properties of emotions and can be applied with relatively short time series, including missing data. The individual elementary properties covered are within-person variability, innovation variability, inertia, granularity, cross-lag regression, and average intensity. The model can be applied to both univariate and multivariate time series, allowing one to model the relationships between emotions. One may include external variables and non-Gaussian observed data. We illustrate the usefulness of the model on data involving 50 participants self-reporting on their experience of 3 emotions across the period of 1 week using experience sampling. (PsycINFO Database Record, ((c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).)

Promoting happiness within society is good for health, but could the overpromotion of happiness have a downside? Across 2 studies, we investigate 2 emotion norms associated with an emphasis on happiness-the importance of (a) seeking positive emotion, and (b) avoiding negative emotion-and whether these norms have implications for how people respond to, and seek to regulate, their negative emotional experiences. In Study 1, we used an experimental design to show that emphasizing the importance of happiness increased rumination in response to failure. In Study 2, we drew on cross-sectional evidence to investigate the other side of this equation, finding that emphasizing the importance of not experiencing negative emotional states (e.g., depression and anxiety) was also associated with increased rumination, and that this had downstream consequences for well-being. Together, the findings suggest that the overpromotion of happiness, and, in turn, the felt social pressure not to experience negative emotional states, has implications for maladaptive responses to negative emotional experiences. (PsycINFO Database Record, ((c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).)

People experience emotions when events are relevant to their current concerns, that is, when events affect their goals, values, or motives that are pertinent at that time. In the current research, we focused on one kind of concern-values-and examined whether different types of concerns are associated with different categories of emotion. More specifically, we investigated whether, at the situation level, the relevance of different types of values is linked to the intensity of different types of emotional experience. We conducted two retrospective survey studies (Studies 1 and 2)-one of which was cross-cultural-and one experience-sampling study (Study three). Together, the three studies provide convergent evidence for associations between the situational relevance of self-focused values (e.g., ambition, success) and socially disengaging emotions (e.g., pride, anger) on the one hand, and between the relevance of other-focused values (e.g., loyalty, helping) and socially engaging emotions (e.g., closeness, shame) on the other. These findings challenge the (often implicit) assumption of emotion theories that different types of concerns are interchangeable-that is, that it does not matter for emotion which concern is relevant as long as one is. In contrast, the current research proposes that different concerns are constitutive elements of different emotional experiences and thus encourages new ways of thinking about emotions. (PsycINFO Database Record, ((c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).)

An important element of understanding the genotype-phenotype link in psychiatric disorders lies in identifying the psychological mechanisms through which genetic variation impacts mental health. Here we examined whether emotional inertia, the tendency for a person's emotions to carry over from 1 moment to the next and a prospective predictor of the development of depression, is associated with a known genetic risk factor for emotional dysregulation, a polymorphism in the serotonin transporter gene (5-HTTLPR). Two hundred thirty-six adolescents recorded their positive and negative emotions in daily life 9 times a day for 6 consecutive days using smartphones, completed a depression questionnaire, and were genotyped for the 5-HTTLPR polymorphism. Carriers of the short 5-HTTLPR were characterized by higher inertia for negative emotions, even after controlling for depressive symptoms. These findings suggest a possible psychological pathway how the serotonin transporter gene contributes to risk for depression. (PsycINFO Database Record, ((c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).)

Romantic partners can modulate each other's emotions in many ways, resulting in interwoven emotional lives. Here, building on findings from basic psychological research, we propose a novel way of such interconnectedness, termed partner-expected affect, in which perceptions of a partner's feelings may positively predict how this partner will actually feel at a later moment in time. We evaluated this hypothesis by means of an experience sampling study in which 100 romantic partners (50 couples) reported on the level of valence and arousal of their own feelings and of the perceived feelings of their partners 10 times a day throughout a week. In line with expectations, we found that how individuals were feeling at a particular moment was positively predicted by how their partner thought they felt at the previous moment (on top of how they felt at the previous moment and how their partner felt at the previous moment), at least when they had interacted with each other in between. This finding identifies a novel potential way in which people may shape each other's feelings and paves the way to further examine the nature and boundary conditions of such partner-expected affect. (PsycINFO Database Record, ((c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved).)

People regulate their emotions not only for hedonic reasons but also for instrumental reasons, to attain the potential benefits of emotions beyond pleasure and pain. However, such instrumental motives have rarely been examined outside the laboratory as they naturally unfold in daily life. To assess whether and how instrumental motives operate outside the laboratory, it is necessary to examine them in response to real and personally relevant stimuli in ecologically valid contexts. In this research, we assessed the frequency, consistency, and predictors of instrumental motives in negative emotion regulation in daily life. Participants (N = 114) recalled the most negative event of their day each evening for 7 days and reported their instrumental motives and negative emotion goals in that event. Participants endorsed performance motives in approximately 1 in 3 events and social, eudaimonic, and epistemic motives in approximately 1 in 10 events. Instrumental motives had substantially higher within- than between-person variance, indicating that they were context-dependent. Indeed, although we found few associations between instrumental motives and personality traits, relationships between instrumental motives and contextual variables were more extensive. Performance, social, and epistemic motives were each predicted by a unique pattern of contextual appraisals. Our data demonstrate that instrumental motives play a role in daily negative emotion regulation as people encounter situations that pose unique regulatory demands. (PsycINFO Database Record, ((c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved).)

Time is given a central place in theoretical models of emotion regulation (Gross, 1998, 2015), but key questions regarding the role of time remain unanswered. We investigated 2 such unanswered questions. First, we explored when different emotion regulation strategies were used within the course of an emotional episode in daily life. Second, we investigated the association between the temporal deployment of strategies and negative emotional experience. We conducted a daily diary study in which participants (N = 74) drew an intensity profile depicting the temporal unfolding of their negative emotional experience across daily events (N = 480), and mapped their usage of emotion regulation strategies onto this intensity profile. Strategies varied in their temporal deployment, with suppression and rumination occurring more at the beginning of the episode, and reappraisal and distraction occurring more toward the end of the episode. Strategies also varied in their association with negative emotion: rumination was positively associated with negative emotion, and reappraisal and distraction were negatively associated with negative emotion. Finally, both rumination and reappraisal interacted with time to predict negative emotional experience. Rumination was more strongly positively associated with negative emotions at the end of the episode than the beginning, but reappraisal was more strongly negatively associated with negative emotion at the beginning of the episode than the end. These findings highlight the importance of accounting for timing in the study of emotion regulation, as well as the necessity of studying these temporal processes in daily life. (PsycINFO Database Record, ((c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved).)

Previous research has emphasized the critical role of negative cognitions as a vulnerability factor in predicting depressive symptoms. Here, the authors argue that processes that function to maintain negative cognitions may serve as a catalyst for the development of depressive symptoms in the context of negative circumstances, and they suggest that poor updating of affective information in working memory is 1 such process. Thus, they posit that under high levels of stress, individuals with poor affective updating are hindered in changing the negative content in working memory associated with stressful events and, therefore, are more likely to experience increased depressive symptoms over time. To examine this hypothesis, the authors assessed affective updating ability, stress, and depressive symptoms in 200 students who were entering their first year of tertiary education. They assessed levels of depressive symptoms again both 4 months and 1 year later. Under high levels of stress, poor affective updating ability was associated with an increase in depressive symptoms at both 4 months and 1 year later. These results demonstrate that affective updating ability is an important cognitive vulnerability factor that interacts with stressful events to accelerate the development of depressive symptoms, and underscore the importance of designing early prevention or intervention approaches for individuals with this cognitive vulnerability., ((c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved).)

Investigators have begun to document links between emotional clarity and forms of negative emotionality, including neuroticism and major depressive disorder (MDD). Researchers to date have relied almost exclusively on global self-reports of emotional clarity; moreover, no studies have examined emotional clarity as a function of valence, although this may prove to be crucial in understanding the relation of emotional clarity to maladjustment. In 2 studies, we used experience-sampling methodology and multilevel modeling to examine the associations between emotional clarity and 2 constructs that have been linked theoretically with emotional clarity: neuroticism and depression. In Study 1 we assessed 95 college students who completed a self-report measure of neuroticism. In Study 2 we examined 53 adults diagnosed with MDD and 53 healthy adults. Reaction times to negative and positive emotion ratings during the experience-sampling protocols were used as an indirect measure of emotional clarity. Neuroticism was related to lower clarity of negative, but not of positive, emotion. Similarly, compared with the healthy controls, individuals with MDD had lower clarity of negative, but not of positive, emotion. It is important to note, findings from both studies held after controlling for baseline RTs and current levels of negative and positive emotion. These findings highlight the importance of assessing valence when examining emotional clarity and increase our understanding of the nature of the emotional disturbances that characterize neuroticism and MDD., ((c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).)

Increased moment-to-moment predictability, or inertia, of negative affect has been identified as an important dynamic marker of psychological maladjustment, and increased vulnerability to depression in particular. However, little is known about the processes underlying emotional inertia. The current article examines how the emotional context, and people's responses to it, are related to emotional inertia. We investigated how individual differences in the inertia of negative affect (NA) are related to individual differences in exposure, reactivity, and recovery from emotional events, in daily life (assessed using experience sampling) as well as in the lab (assessed using an emotional film-clip task), among 200 participants commencing their first year of tertiary education. This dual-method approach allowed us to assess affective responding on different timescales, and in response to standardized as well as idiographic emotional stimuli. Our most consistent finding, across both methods, was that heightened NA inertia is related to decreased NA recovery following negative stimuli, suggesting that higher levels of inertia may be mostly driven by impairments in affect repair following negative events., ((c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).)

Emotion differentiation refers to the level of specificity with which people distinguish between their emotional states and is considered to play an important role for psychological well-being. Yet, not much is known about what characterizes people high or low in emotion differentiation and what underlies these differences. In 2 studies involving experience sampling (Studies 1-2) and lab based (Study 2) methods, we investigated how emotion differentiation is related to individual differences in valence focus and the overlap in appraisal patterns between emotions. In line with expectations, results showed that high levels of both positive and negative emotion differentiation are related to lower levels of valence focus and lower levels of appraisal overlap between emotions. These findings suggest that individuals who are low in emotion differentiation mainly emphasize the valence aspect of emotions while individuals who are high in emotion differentiation make stronger distinctions between emotions in terms of their underlying appraisal profiles., ((c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).)

The experience of positive emotion is closely linked to subjective well-being. For this reason, campaigns aimed at promoting the value of positive emotion have become widespread. What is rarely considered are the cultural implications of this focus on happiness. Promoting positive emotions as important for "the good life" not only has implications for how individuals value these emotional states, but for how they believe others around them value these emotions also. Drawing on data from over 9,000 college students across 47 countries we examined whether individuals' life satisfaction is associated with living in contexts in which positive emotions are socially valued. The findings show that people report more life satisfaction in countries where positive emotions are highly valued and this is linked to an increased frequency of positive emotional experiences in these contexts. They also reveal, however, that increased life satisfaction in countries that place a premium on positive emotion is less evident for people who tend to experience less valued emotional states: people who experience many negative emotions, do not flourish to the same extent in these contexts. The findings demonstrate how the cultural value placed on certain emotion states may shape the relationship between emotional experiences and subjective well-being.

Depression not only involves disturbances in prevailing affect, but also in how affect fluctuates over time. Yet, precisely which patterns of affect dynamics are associated with depressive symptoms remains unclear; depression has been linked with increased affective variability and instability, but also with greater resistance to affective change (inertia). In this paper, we argue that these paradoxical findings stem from a number of neglected methodological/analytical factors, which we address using a novel paradigm and analytic approach. Participants (N = 99), preselected to represent a wide range of depressive symptoms, watched a series of emotional film clips and rated their affect at baseline and following each film clip. We also assessed participants' affect in daily life over 1 week using experience sampling. When controlling for overlap between different measures of affect dynamics, depressive symptoms were independently associated with higher inertia of negative affect in the lab, and with greater negative affect variability both in the lab and in daily life. In contrast, depressive symptoms were not independently related to higher affective instability either in daily life or in the lab.

Emotion regulation has primarily been studied either experimentally or by using retrospective trait questionnaires. Very few studies have investigated emotion regulation in the context in which it is usually deployed, namely, the complexity of everyday life. We address this in the current paper by reporting findings of two experience-sampling studies (Ns = 46 and 95) investigating the use of six emotion-regulation strategies (reflection, reappraisal, rumination, distraction, expressive suppression, and social sharing) and their associations with changes in positive affect (PA) and negative affect (NA) in daily life. Regarding the relative use of emotion-regulation strategies, a highly similar ordering was found across both studies with distraction being used more than sharing and reappraisal. While the use of all six strategies was positively correlated both within- and between-persons, different strategies were associated with distinct affective consequences: Suppression and rumination were associated with increases in NA and decreases in PA, whereas reflection was associated with increases in PA across both studies. Additionally, reappraisal, distraction, and social sharing were related to increases in PA in Study 2. Discussion focuses on how the current findings fit with theoretical models of emotion regulation and with previous evidence from experimental and retrospective studies.

Although there exists a consensus that depression is characterized by preferential processing of negative information, empirical findings to support the association between depression and rumination on the one hand and selective attention for negative stimuli on the other hand have been elusive. We argue that one of the reasons for the inconsistent findings may be the use of aggregate measures of response times and accuracies to measure attentional bias. Diffusion model analysis allows to partial out the information processing component from other components that comprise the decision-making process. In this study, we applied a diffusion model to an emotional flanker task. Results revealed that when focusing on a negative target, both rumination and depression were associated with facilitated processing due to negative distracters, whereas only rumination was associated with less interference by positive distracters. After controlling for depression scores, rumination still predicted attentional bias for negative information, but depression scores were no longer predictive after controlling for rumination. Consistent with elusive findings in the literature, we did not find this pattern of results when using accuracy scores or mean response times. Our results suggest that rumination accounts for the attentional bias for negative information found in depression., (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved.)

Our emotions don't have lives of their own, but mutually influence each other across time. Augmentation and blunting occur when experience of a current emotion increases or decreases the experience of another, subsequent emotion, and play a role in many everyday phenomena. In this study, we investigated patterns of augmentation and blunting between the experience of anger, sadness, relaxation, and happiness in daily life. In general, emotions with similar (opposite) valence showed augmentation (blunting) from one moment to the next. In search for a possible underlying mechanism, we showed that strength of augmentation and blunting was a function of degree of idiosyncratic appraisal overlap between two emotional states. This occurred even to the point that emotions with similar valence blunted one another in cases of small overlap, and emotions with opposite valence augmented one another in cases of large overlap. The findings reveal the dynamic interplay between different emotions across time, and highlight the role of appraisal overlap therein., (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved.)

Though much is known about the stable mood patterns that characterize depressive disorder, less attention has been directed to identifying and understanding the temporal dynamics of emotions. In the present study, we examined how depression affects the trajectory of dysphoric and angry adolescent emotional behavior during adolescent-parent interactions. Adolescents (72 depressed; 69 nondepressed) engaged in video recorded positive and negative interactions with their parents. Depressed adolescents showed a linear increase in dysphoric behaviors throughout the negative interactions, while the incidence of these behaviors remained relatively stable across the interactions among nondepressed adolescents. A similar linear increase was not found in angry behavior. These findings show that depression in adolescence is associated with greater escalation of dysphoria during conflictual interactions between adolescents and their parents.

Emotional inertia-the degree to which people's feelings carry over from one moment to the next-is an important property of the temporal dynamics of emotions. Thus far, emotional inertia has only been examined as a stable, trait-like characteristic. However, internal or external events (e.g., stress) may trigger changes in people's emotion dynamics, particularly among individuals with heightened sensitivity to such events. The current study investigated how emotional inertia is influenced by the anticipation of social stress, and how this effect is moderated by individual differences in depression, self-esteem, and fear of negative evaluation. We measured participants' (n = 71) emotional inertia in daily life using experience sampling before and after experimentally manipulating anticipatory social stress. Consistent with previous research, psychological maladjustment was associated with higher emotional inertia during "normal" daily life. However, when anticipating a socially stressful event, levels of emotional inertia dropped, particularly among participants scoring high on depression and fear of negative evaluation and low on self-esteem. These results demonstrate that emotion dynamics can vary as a function of contextual factors and identify moderators of such variation., ((PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).)

Emotional inertia refers to the degree to which a person's current emotional state is predicted by their prior emotional state, reflecting how much it carries over from one moment to the next. Recently, in a cross-sectional study, we showed that high inertia is an important characteristic of the emotion dynamics observed in psychological maladjustment such as depression. In the present study, we examined whether emotional inertia prospectively predicts the onset of first-episode depression during adolescence. Emotional inertia was assessed in a sample of early adolescents (N = 165) based on second-to-second behavioral coding of videotaped naturalistic interactions with a parent. Greater inertia of both negative and positive emotional behaviors predicted the emergence of clinical depression 2.5 years later. The implications of these findings for the understanding of the etiology and early detection of depression are discussed., ((PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).)

Our perception of how others expect us to feel has significant implications for our emotional functioning. Across 4 studies the authors demonstrate that when people think others expect them not to feel negative emotions (i.e., sadness) they experience more negative emotion and reduced well-being. The authors show that perceived social expectancies predict these differences in emotion and well-being both more consistently than-and independently of-personal expectancies and that they do so by promoting negative self-evaluation when experiencing negative emotion. We find evidence for these effects within Australia (Studies 1 and 2) as well as Japan (Study 2), although the effects of social expectancies are especially evident in the former (Studies 1 and 2). We also find experimental evidence for the causal role of social expectancies in negative emotional responses to negative emotional events (Studies 3 and 4). In short, when people perceive that others think they should feel happy, and not sad, this leads them to feel sad more frequently and intensely., (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

Using a daily process design, the present study examined relationships between momentary appraisals and emotional experience based on Smith and Lazarus' (1993) theory of emotions (1993). Nine times a day for 2 weeks, participants (N = 33, 23 women) recorded their momentary experience of 2 positive emotions (joy, love) and 4 negative emotions (anger, guilt, fear, sadness) and the core relational theme appraisal contents Smith and Lazarus hypothesized as corresponding to these emotions. A series of multilevel modeling analyses found that the hypothesized relationships between appraisal contents and these emotions were stronger than relationships between contents and other emotions, although appraisals were related to other emotions in many cases. Moreover, there were some individual differences in the strength of these relationships. These results suggest that there are no one-to-one relationships between appraisal contents and specific emotional experiences, and that specific emotions are associated with different appraisal contents, and that specific appraisals are associated with different emotions.

How people's feelings change across time can be represented as trajectories in a core affect space defined by the dimensions of valence and activation. In this article, the authors analyzed individual differences in within-person affective variability defined as characteristics of core affect trajectories, introducing new ways to conceptualize affective variability. In 2 studies, participants provided multiple reports across time describing how they were feeling in terms of core affect. From these data, characteristics of participants' core affect trajectories were derived. Across both studies, core affect variability was negatively related to average valence, self-esteem, and agreeableness, and it was positively related to neuroticism and depression. Moreover, spin, a measure of how much people experienced qualitatively different feelings within the core affect space, was related more consistently to trait measures of adjustment and personality than other measures of within-person variability, including widely used measures of within-person single-dimension standard deviations.

The nature of the association between anger and 5 appraisal-action tendency components--goal obstacle, other accountability, unfairness, control, and antagonism--was examined in terms of specificity, necessity, and sufficiency. In 2 studies, participants described recently experienced unpleasant situations in which 1 of the appraisal-action tendency components was present or absent and indicated which emotions they had experienced. The results showed that (a) other accountability and arrogant entitlement, as an instance of unfairness, are specific appraisals ability for anger; and most important, (b) none of the components is necessary or sufficient for anger. The findings suggest that the relation between emotions and appraisal-action tendency components should be conceptualized instead as a contingent association, meaning that they usually co-occur.