Dynamic approaches to emotions and stress in everyday life: Bolger and Zuckerman reloaded with positive as well as negative affects

Evidence that moment-to-moment variation in positive emotions buffer genetic risk for depression: a momentary assessment twin study

OBJECTIVE

The negative affective response to daily life stressors, which previous work suggest is a fundamental depression endophenotype, may be moderated by positive emotions. It was investigated whether positive affect (PA) buffers negative affect (NA) reactivity in response to stress and whether PA moderates the genetic predisposition to negative affect reactivity.

METHOD

A total of 279 twin pairs participated in a momentary assessment study with the experience sampling method, collecting appraisals of stress and affect in the flow of daily life. Lifetime diagnoses of depression were obtained.

RESULTS

There was a significant interaction between stress appraisal of event (STRESS) and PA in the association with NA. The interaction between proband PA, proband STRESS and co-twin lifetime depression showed that higher PA reduced the interaction between proband STRESS and co-twin lifetime depression.

CONCLUSION

Positive emotions not only buffer against NA reactivity, but in addition attenuate genetic effects on negative mood bias in daily life.

Ceremonies of the whole: does social participation moderate the mood consequences of neuroticism?

BACKGROUND

The aim of this research was to test whether social participation is associated with improvements in mood and well-being, and in particular to test whether social participation might moderate the chronic distress associated with high levels of neuroticism (N).

METHOD

A rural Australian sample of 394 adults (54.3% female) completed questionnaires and participated in follow-up interviews. Social participation was indexed by community group membership, and operationalised for analysis in two forms: extent (number of group memberships) and presence (zero vs. one or more memberships). Mood was measured as Positive Affect (PA) and Negative Affect (NA) as rated on the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule and well-being was measured with Diener's Satisfaction with Life (SWL) questionnaire. Items from Goldberg's International Personality Item Pool were used to measure N.

RESULTS

The extent of social participation was significantly associated with all three mood/well-being variables in bivariate analyses, and remained as a significant net predictor of PA and NA (beta = 0.11, P < 0.05, beta = -0.13, P < 0.05) when modeled with age, gender and income. In parallel, categorical social participation was found to be significantly associated with PA, NA and SWL in bivariate analyses and in multivariate analyses controlling for age, gender and income (beta = 0.11, P < 0.05, beta = -0.15, P < 0.01 and beta = 0.11, P < 0.05, respectively). The interaction term N*Social interaction was significantly correlated with NA in bivariate analyses involving both continuous (r = -0.14, P < 0.01) and categorical (r = -0.13, P < 0.01) measures of social participation, and in its continuous form remained a significant net predictor of NA after controlling for the main effects of N and Social participation (beta = -0.09, P < 0.05).

CONCLUSIONS

The present findings extend upon existing evidence that social participation tends to be positively associated with mental health by demonstrating the predicted effect across a comprehensive set of mood/well-being variables. Preliminary evidence was also obtained that social participation may serve as a moderator of the chronic distress associated with N. It is concluded that further research seeking to confirm the causal direction of the identified pathways is warranted.

Effects of day-to-day affect regulation on the pain experience of patients with rheumatoid arthritis

Individual differences in the regulation of affect are known to impact pain and other symptoms in rheumatoid arthritis. However, no studies have yet used a rigorous daily diary methodology to address the question of whether current pain is reduced when positive or negative affects are effectively regulated. We used a prospective, repeated daily sampling design to infer the regulation of affect from day-to-day changes in affect intensity and examined how these changes in affect were prospectively related to pain from rheumatoid arthritis. Ninety-four adult patients diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis completed daily measures of pain and positive and negative affect over a period of 30 days. Information on demographic and disease status variables was collected during a medical evaluation. Results of hierarchical linear model analyses indicated that the regulation of both positive and negative affect from the prior day to the current day predicted significantly greater decreases in pain that day, resulting in up to a 28% reduction in pain intensity. These findings were partly influenced by disease status and demographic variables. This study suggests that the day-to-day regulation of negative and positive affect is a key variable for understanding the pain experience of individuals with rheumatoid arthritis and is a potentially important target for intervention.

Daily Affective Reactivity as a Prospective Predictor of Depressive Symptoms

Daily affective reactivity refers to the within-subject relationship between daily stress and daily mood. Most stress researchers have conceptualized daily affective reactivity as a dependent variable to be predicted by individual difference variables such as personality and psychopathology. In contrast, in our recent research, we have conceptualized daily affective reactivity as an independent variable that can predict depressive symptoms. In this article, we summarize three studies that relied on a daily process methodology and multilevel modeling to assess affective reactivity in the context of daily stressful events. Two of the studies (Cohen, Butler, Gunthert, & Beck, 2005; Gunthert, Cohen, Butler, & Beck, 2005) sampled adult outpatients in cognitive therapy and evaluated the predictive role of daily affective reactivity in treatment outcome (depression reduction). A third study (O'Neill, Cohen, Tolpin, & Gunthert, 2004) evaluated the predictive role of college students' daily affective reactivity in the development of depressive symptoms. We consider the strengths and weaknesses of a daily process methodology for research on depression in both clinical and nonclinical samples.