Peter Kuppens

The Role of Positive and Negative Emotions in Life Satisfaction Judgment Across Nations

This study examined how the frequency of positive and negative emotions is related to life satisfaction across nations. Participants were 8,557 people from 46 countries who reported on their life satisfaction and frequency of positive and negative emotions. Multilevel analyses showed that across nations, the experience of positive emotions was more strongly related to life satisfaction than the absence of negative emotions. Yet, the cultural dimensions of individualism and survival/self-expression moderated these relationships. Negative emotional experiences were more negatively related to life satisfaction in individualistic than in collectivistic nations, and positive emotional experiences had a larger positive relationship with life satisfaction in nations that stress self-expression than in nations that value survival. These findings show how emotional aspects of the good life vary with national culture and how this depends on the values that characterize ones society. Although to some degree, positive and negative emotions might be universally viewed as desirable and undesirable, respectively, there appear to be clear cultural differences in how relevant such emotional experiences are to quality of life.

Categories versus dimensions in personality and psychopathology: a quantitative review of taxometric research

Taxometric research methods were developed by Paul Meehl and colleagues to distinguish between categorical and dimensional models of latent variables. We have conducted a comprehensive review of published taxometric research that included 177 articles, 311 distinct findings and a combined sample of 533 377 participants. Multilevel logistic regression analyses have examined the methodological and substantive variables associated with taxonic (categorical) findings. Although 38.9% of findings were taxonic, these findings were much less frequent in more recent and methodologically stronger studies, and in those reporting comparative fit indices based on simulated comparison data. When these and other possible confounds were statistically controlled, the true prevalence of taxonic findings was estimated at 14%. The domains of normal personality, mood disorders, anxiety disorders, eating disorders, externalizing disorders, and personality disorders (PDs) other than schizotypal yielded little persuasive evidence of taxa. Promising but still not definitive evidence of psychological taxa was confined to the domains of schizotypy, substance use disorders and autism. This review indicates that most latent variables of interest to psychiatrists and personality and clinical psychologists are dimensional, and that many influential taxonic findings of early taxometric research are likely to be spurious.

A nonlinear mixed model framework for item response theory

Mixed models take the dependency between observations based on the same cluster into account by introducing 1 or more random effects. Common item response theory (IRT) models introduce latent person variables to model the dependence between responses of the same participant. Assuming a distribution for the latent variables, these IRT models are formally equivalent with nonlinear mixed models. It is shown how a variety of IRT models can be formulated as particular instances of nonlinear mixed models. The unifying framework offers the advantage that relations between different IRT models become explicit and that it is rather straightforward to see how existing IRT models can be adapted and extended. The approach is illustrated with a self-report study on anger.

Emotional Inertia and Psychological Maladjustment

In this article, we examine the concept of emotional inertia as a fundamental property of the emotion dynamics that characterize psychological maladjustment. Emotional inertia refers to the degree to which emotional states are resistant to change. Because psychological maladjustment has been associated with both emotional underreactivity and ineffective emotion-regulation skills, we hypothesized that its overall emotion dynamics would be characterized by high levels of inertia. We provide evidence from two naturalistic studies that, using different methods, showed that the emotional fluctuations of individuals who exhibited low self-esteem (Study 1) and depression (Study 2) were characterized by higher levels of inertia in both positive and negative emotions than the emotional fluctuations of people who did not exhibit low self-esteem and depression. We also discuss the usefulness of the concept of emotional inertia as a hallmark of maladaptive emotion dynamics.

The Appraisal Basis of Anger: Specificity, Necessity, and Sufficiency of Components

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.

Critical slowing down as early warning for the onset and termination of depression

Significance As complex systems such as the climate or ecosystems approach a tipping point, their dynamics tend to become dominated by a phenomenon known as critical slowing down. Using time series of autorecorded mood, we show that indicators of slowing down are also predictive of future transitions in depression. Specifically, in persons who are more likely to have a future transition, mood dynamics are slower and different aspects of mood are more correlated. This supports the view that the mood system may have tipping points where reinforcing feedbacks among a web of symptoms can propagate a person into a disorder. Our findings suggest the possibility of early warning systems for psychiatric disorders, using smartphone-based mood monitoring. About 17% of humanity goes through an episode of major depression at some point in their lifetime. Despite the enormous societal costs of this incapacitating disorder, it is largely unknown how the likelihood of falling into a depressive episode can be assessed. Here, we show for a large group of healthy individuals and patients that the probability of an upcoming shift between a depressed and a normal state is related to elevated temporal autocorrelation, variance, and correlation between emotions in fluctuations of autorecorded emotions. These are indicators of the general phenomenon of critical slowing down, which is expected to occur when a system approaches a tipping point. Our results support the hypothesis that mood may have alternative stable states separated by tipping points, and suggest an approach for assessing the likelihood of transitions into and out of depression.

Regulating positive and negative emotions in daily life

The present study examined how people regulate their emotions in daily life and how such regulation is related to their daily affective experience and psychological adjustment. Each day for an average of 3 weeks, participants described how they had regulated their emotions in terms of the reappraisal and suppression (inhibiting the expression) of positive and negative emotions, and they described their emotional experience, self-esteem, and psychological adjustment in terms of Becks triadic model of depression. Reappraisal was used more often than suppression, and suppressing positive emotions was used less than the other three strategies. In general, regulation through reappraisal was found to be beneficial, whereas regulation by suppression was not. Reappraisal of positive emotions was associated with increases in positive affect, self-esteem, and psychological adjustment, whereas suppressing positive emotions was associated with decreased positive emotion, self-esteem, and psychological adjustment, and increased negative emotions. Moreover, relationships between reappraisal and psychological adjustment and self-esteem were mediated by experienced positive affect, whereas relationships between suppression of positive emotions and self-esteem adjustment were mediated by negative affect.

Feelings change: accounting for individual differences in the temporal dynamics of affect.

People display a remarkable variability in the patterns and trajectories with which their feelings change over time. In this article, we present a theoretical account for the dynamics of affect (DynAffect) that identifies the major processes underlying individual differences in the temporal dynamics of affective experiences. It is hypothesized that individuals are characterized by an affective home base, a baseline attractor state around which affect fluctuates. These fluctuations vary as the result of internal or external processes to which an individual is more or less sensitive and are regulated and tied back to the home base by the attractor strength. Individual differences in these 3 processes--affective home base, variability, and attractor strength--are proposed to underlie individual differences in affect dynamics. The DynAffect account is empirically evaluated by means of a diffusion modeling approach in 2 extensive experience-sampling studies on peoples core affective experiences. The findings show that the model is capable of adequately capturing the observed dynamics in core affect across both large (Study 1) and shorter time scales (Study 2) and illuminate how the key processes are related to personality and emotion dispositions. Implications for the understanding of affect dynamics and affective dysfunctioning in psychopathology are also discussed.

A Network Approach to Psychopathology: New Insights into Clinical Longitudinal Data

In the network approach to psychopathology, disorders are conceptualized as networks of mutually interacting symptoms (e.g., depressed mood) and transdiagnostic factors (e.g., rumination). This suggests that it is necessary to study how symptoms dynamically interact over time in a network architecture. In the present paper, we show how such an architecture can be constructed on the basis of time-series data obtained through Experience Sampling Methodology (ESM). The proposed methodology determines the parameters for the interaction between nodes in the network by estimating a multilevel vector autoregression (VAR) model on the data. The methodology allows combining between-subject and within-subject information in a multilevel framework. The resulting network architecture can subsequently be analyzed through network analysis techniques. In the present study, we apply the method to a set of items that assess mood-related factors. We show that the analysis generates a plausible and replicable network architecture, the structure of which is related to variables such as neuroticism; that is, for subjects who score high on neuroticism, worrying plays a more central role in the network. Implications and extensions of the methodology are discussed.

The Relation Between Valence and Arousal in Subjective Experience

Affect is basic to many if not all psychological phenomena. This article examines 2 of the most fundamental properties of affective experience--valence and arousal--asking how they are related to each other on a moment to moment basis. Over the past century, 6 distinct types of relations have been suggested or implicitly presupposed in the literature. We critically review the available evidence for each proposal and argue that the evidence does not provide a conclusive answer. Next, we use statistical modeling to verify the different proposals in 8 data sets (with Ns ranging from 80 to 1,417) where participants reported their affective experiences in response to experimental stimuli in laboratory settings or as momentary or remembered in natural settings. We formulate 3 key conclusions about the relation between valence and arousal: (a) on average, there is a weak but consistent V-shaped relation of arousal as a function of valence, but (b) there is large variation at the individual level, so that (c) valence and arousal can in principle show a variety of relations depending on person or circumstances. This casts doubt on the existence of a static, lawful relation between valence and arousal. The meaningfulness of the observed individual differences is supported by their personality and cultural correlates. The malleability and individual differences found in the structure of affect must be taken into account when studying affect and its role in other psychological phenomena.