Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, KU Leuven.
Emotion. 2015 Oct;15(5):625-36. doi: 10.1037/emo0000059. Epub 2015 Apr 6.
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.
负面情绪的瞬间可预测性或惯性增加已被确定为心理适应不良的一个重要动态标志物，尤其是对抑郁症的易感性增加。然而，人们对情绪惯性背后的过程知之甚少。本文探讨了情绪背景及其对情绪惯性的反应如何相关。我们研究了负面情绪（NA）惯性的个体差异如何与日常生活中（使用经验抽样法评估）以及实验室中（使用情感电影剪辑任务评估）情绪事件的暴露、反应和恢复的个体差异相关，共有 200 名开始接受高等教育的第一年的参与者。这种双重方法使我们能够在不同的时间尺度上评估情感反应，并对标准化和个体化的情感刺激做出反应。我们最一致的发现是，在两种方法中，NA 惯性的增加与负面刺激后的 NA 恢复减少有关，这表明更高水平的惯性可能主要是由负面事件后修复情绪的能力受损引起的。
