Department of Psychology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, T6G 2E9, Canada.
Psychology in Education Research Centre, Department of Education, University of York, York, YO10 5DD, UK.
J Youth Adolesc. 2019 Sep;48(9):1849-1860. doi: 10.1007/s10964-019-01075-2. Epub 2019 Jul 12.
Emotional inertia represents the extent to which individuals' emotions tend to carry over from one time point to the next. High emotional inertia indicates low emotion regulation ability and has been associated with psychological maladjustment and mood disorders. However, the extent of genetic influence on emotional inertia, particularly in adolescents, is largely unknown. The current study examined genetic and environmental influences on individual differences in emotional inertia. This study followed a sample of 447 17-year-old same-sex UK twins (41% males) with an innovative intensive longitudinal daily diary design that captured their intra-individual emotion fluctuations over one month. Adolescents reported their positive and negative emotions once a day consecutively for up to 40 days. Time series analyses were used to construct emotional inertia and classical twin analyses were used to disentangle its genetic and environmental influences. The results showed that inertia for positive emotion was only modestly heritable and inertia for negative emotion showed no heritability at all. Both measures showed predominantly non-shared environmental influences. These findings highlight the importance of unique environmental influences in shaping individual differences in how well adolescents regulate their emotions and how easily they move from one emotional state to another in daily life. The importance of identifying specific environmental influences on emotional inertia is discussed, and suggestions of what those influences might be are offered.
情绪惯性代表个体的情绪从一个时间点延续到下一个时间点的程度。高情绪惯性表明情绪调节能力较低，与心理适应不良和情绪障碍有关。然而，遗传对情绪惯性的影响程度，特别是在青少年中，很大程度上是未知的。本研究考察了个体差异中情绪惯性的遗传和环境影响。这项研究跟踪了 447 名 17 岁的英国同性别双胞胎（41%为男性），采用了创新的密集纵向日常日记设计，在一个月内捕捉他们的个体情绪波动。青少年每天报告一次积极和消极情绪，最多持续 40 天。时间序列分析用于构建情绪惯性，经典的双胞胎分析用于区分其遗传和环境影响。结果表明，积极情绪的惯性只有适度的遗传性，而消极情绪的惯性则完全没有遗传性。这两种衡量标准都主要表现为非共享的环境影响。这些发现强调了独特的环境影响在塑造青少年调节情绪的个体差异以及他们在日常生活中从一种情绪状态到另一种情绪状态的难易程度方面的重要性。讨论了确定情绪惯性的特定环境影响的重要性，并提出了可能的影响因素。
