Not only how good or bad people feel on average, but also how their feelings fluctuate across time is crucial for psychological health. The last 2 decades have witnessed a surge in research linking various patterns of short-term emotional change to adaptive or maladaptive psychological functioning, often with conflicting results. A meta-analysis was performed to identify consistent relationships between patterns of short-term emotion dynamics-including patterns reflecting emotional variability (measured in terms of within-person standard deviation of emotions across time), emotional instability (measured in terms of the magnitude of consecutive emotional changes), and emotional inertia of emotions over time (measured in terms of autocorrelation)-and relatively stable indicators of psychological well-being or psychopathology. We determined how such relationships are moderated by the type of emotional change, type of psychological well-being or psychopathology involved, valence of the emotion, and methodological factors. A total of 793 effect sizes were identified from 79 articles (N ϭ 11,381) and were subjected to a 3-level meta-analysis. The results confirmed that overall, low psychological well-being co-occurs with more variable (overall ˆϭ Ϫ.178), unstable (overall ˆϭ Ϫ.205), but also more inert (overall ˆϭ Ϫ.151) emotions. These effect sizes were stronger when involving negative compared with positive emotions. Moreover, the results provided evidence for consistency across different types of psychological well-being and psychopathology in their relation with these dynamical patterns, although specificity was also observed. The findings demonstrate that psychological flourishing is characterized by specific patterns of emotional fluctuations across time, and provide insight into what constitutes optimal and suboptimal emotional functioning.Keywords: psychological well-being, psychopathology, emotional variability, emotional instability, emotional inertia A fundamental feature of our emotions and feelings is that they change over time. The patterns of emotional fluctuations reflect how people deal with changes in the environment and how they regulate their emotions (Larsen, 2000), and both contribute importantly to their psychological well-being. Indeed, a surge of research focusing on the time dynamic patterns of emotional experience has shown that, next to how people usually feel or how they feel on average, the patterns with which people's emotional experiences change over time provide unique information that is relevant for psychological well-being. Here we present a meta-analysis of studies investigating the relation between on the one hand short-term dynamical patterns of emotions and on the other hand stable forms of psychological well-being and psychopathology, to identify the patterns of emotional change associated with general and specific forms of psychological health.We define psychological well-being as a broad construct that involves either or both the presence of positive indicators of psychologi...

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Currently, little is known about the association between assessment intensity, burden, data quantity, and data quality in experience sampling method (ESM) studies. Researchers therefore have insufficient information to make informed decisions about the design of their ESM study. Our aim was to investigate the effects of different sampling frequencies and questionnaire lengths on burden, compliance, and careless responding. Students ( n = 163) received either a 30- or 60-item questionnaire three, six, or nine times per day for 14 days. Preregistered multilevel regression analyses and analyses of variance were used to analyze the effect of design condition on momentary outcomes, changes in those outcomes over time, and retrospective outcomes. Our findings offer support for increased burden and compromised data quantity and quality with longer questionnaires, but not with increased sampling frequency. We therefore advise against the use of long ESM questionnaires, while high-sampling frequencies do not seem to be associated with negative consequences.

Emotion differentiation, the ability to make fine-grained distinctions between emotional states, has mainly been studied as a trait. In this research, we examine within-person fluctuations in emotion differentiation and hypothesize that stress is a central factor in predicting these fluctuations. We predict that experiencing stress will result in lower levels of emotion differentiation. Using data from a 3-wave longitudinal experience sampling study, we examined the within-person fluctuations in the level of emotion differentiation across days and months and tested if these fluctuations related to changes in stress levels. On the day-level, we found that differentiation of negative emotions varied significantly within individuals, that high stress levels were associated with lower levels of emotion differentiation, and that stress on 1 day negatively predicted the level of differentiation of negative emotions on a next day (but not vice versa). On the wave-level, we found a concurrent, but not a prospective relationship between stress and emotion differentiation. These results are the first to directly demonstrate the role of stress in predicting fluctuations in emotion differentiation and have implications for our theoretical understanding of emotion differentiation, as well as for interventions. (PsycINFO Database Record

Although emotion dysregulation has consistently been conceptualized as a core problem of borderline personality disorder (BPD), a comprehensive, and empirically and ecologically validated model that captures the exact types of dysregulation remains absent. In the present article, we combine insights from basic affective science and the biosocial theory of BPD to present a theoretical model that captures the most fundamental affective dynamical processes that underlie BPD and stipulates that individuals with BPD are characterized by more negative affective homebases, higher levels of affective variability, and lower levels of attractor strength or return to baseline. Next, we empirically validate this proposal by statistically modeling data from three electronic diary studies on emotional responses to personally relevant stimuli in personally relevant environments that were collected both from patients with BPD (N ϭ 50, 42, and 43) and from healthy subjects (N ϭ 50, 24, and 28). The results regarding negative affective homebases and heightened affective variabilities consistently confirmed our hypotheses across all three datasets. The findings regarding attractor strengths (i.e., return to baseline) were less consistent and of smaller magnitude. The transdiagnostic nature of our approach may help to elucidate the common and distinctive mechanisms that underlie several different disorders that are characterized by affective dysregulation.Although emotion dysregulation has been consistently conceptualized as the core problem of borderline personality disorder (BPD; Crowell et al