Emotional inertia and external events: The roles of exposure, reactivity, and recovery.

Abstract

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.

Network destabilization and transition in depression: New methods for studying the dynamics of therapeutic change

“…Deviations from this baseline that are too great trigger a “pull back” reaction to maintain the default organization. Consistent with this idea, negative emotion inertia predicts less negative emotion recovery after exposure to negative stimuli, which the authors hypothesize to be an impairment in mood repair (Koval et al, in press). …”

“…Koval et al, in press; Thompson et al, 2012). Wichers and colleagues (2011) illustrate this method in the context of providing person-tailored feedback in everyday life.…”

The effects of computer-based mindfulness training on Self-control and Mindfulness within Ambulatorily assessed network Systems across Health-related domains in a healthy student population (SMASH): study protocol for a randomized controlled trial

“…Due to conditional branching in the presentation of items during the Ambulatory Assessment, participants answer 31 to 50 items (Additional file 2: Tables S1, S2 and S3) at each signal six times per day regarding (1) positive and negative affect [48, 49], (2) worrying [24, 50], (3) momentary emotion regulation strategies [12], (4) attention (item from previous research in our laboratory) and (5) situational circumstances (items from several Ambulatory Assessment prompts [8, 11, 12, 51]). If a participant indicates a specific desire, additional items appear on the smartphone screen depending on the indicated desire: for example, if a given participant indicates the desire “food”, items are presented that assess specific eating behaviors.…”

“…Ambulatory Assessment allows for tapping into the momentary experiences and the situational context that impact the enactment of self-control in a given real-life situation. Due to these advantages, Ambulatory Assessment strategies have been used to study self-control in a broad range of health-related domains, such as smoking [11], emotion regulation [12] or eating behavior [13] and have led to the identification of a range of predictors in these fields.…”

Mindfulness and Affect-Network Density: Does Mindfulness Facilitate Disengagement from Affective Experiences in Daily Life?

“…High levels in affective inertia can be interpreted as regulatory weakness (De Haan-Rietdijk et al 2016), with a reduced ability to disengage from recent events resulting in previous experiences spilling over into the future (Suls et al 1998). Evidence for this assumption has been provided by Koval et al (2015), who found increased negative affect inertia to be associated with less negative affect recovery from negative stimuli in both a laboratory and a real-life setting.…”