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Complex affect dynamics add limited information to the prediction of psychological well-being

Nature Human Behaviour volume 3, pages 478–491 (2019)Cite this article

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Matters Arising to this article was published on 27 April 2020

Abstract

Over the years, many studies have demonstrated a relation between emotion dynamics and psychological well-being1. Because our emotional life is inherently time-dynamic2,3,4,5,6, affective scientists argue that, next to how positive or negative we feel on average, patterns of emotional change are informative for mental health7,8,9,10. This growing interest initiated a surge in new affect dynamic measures, each claiming to capture a unique dynamical aspect of our emotional life, crucial for understanding well-being. Although this accumulation suggests scientific progress, researchers have not always evaluated (a) how different affect dynamic measures empirically interrelate and (b) what their added value is in the prediction of psychological well-being. Here, we address these questions by analysing affective time series data from 15 studies (n = 1,777). We show that (a) considerable interdependencies between measures exist, suggesting that single dynamics often do not convey unique information, and (b) dynamic measures have little added value over mean levels of positive and negative affect (and variance in these affective states) when predicting individual differences in three indicators of well-being (life satisfaction, depressive symptoms and borderline symptoms). Our findings indicate that conventional emotion research is currently unable to demonstrate independent relations between affect dynamics and psychological well-being.

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Fig. 1: Simulated data for each affect dynamic measure, showing how low and high values for each measure would manifest in a person’s affective time series.
Fig. 2: Evaluating the empirical overlap between all affect dynamic measures.
Fig. 3: Evaluating the added explanatory power of all affect dynamic measures in the linear prediction of psychological well-being outcomes above and beyond mean levels of, and standard deviations in, positive and negative affect.

Data availability

To run the code and reproduce our analyses, two datasets17,29 are provided in the Supplementary Data or are available online from the Open Science Framework (http://osf.io/zm6uw). The other datasets used in this article are available upon reasonable request from the original sources referenced in Supplementary Table 1, but restrictions apply to the availability of these data, which were used under licence for the current study, and so are not publicly available.

Code availability

All analyses reported in this paper were conducted in MATLAB (R2017a), except the visualization of the correlational network, which was performed in R (v.3.4.0). The reproducible MATLAB and R code are provided as Supplementary Matlab Code and Supplementary R Code, respectively, or are available online from the Open Science Framework (http://osf.io/zm6uw).

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the Research Fund of KU Leuven (grant nos. GOA/15/003 and OT/11/031). M.M. and M.H. are supported by the Fund of Scientific Research Flanders. We sincerely thank the following researchers that provided data for this project: A. Brose, B. Bastian, I. Gotlib, J. Jonides, E. Kalokerinos, P. Koval, U. Lindenberger, M. Lövdén, M. Pe, F. Schmiedek, R. Thompson, T. Trull and K. Van der Gucht. This article uses data from the COGITO study, supported by a grant from the Innovation Fund of the President of the Max Planck Society to U. Lindenberger. The computational resources and services used in this work were provided by the VSC (Flemish Supercomputer Center), funded by the Research Foundation—Flanders (FWO) and the Flemish Government, department EWI. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.

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  1. These authors contributed equally: Egon Dejonckheere, Merijn Mestdagh.

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  1. KU Leuven—Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Leuven, Belgium

    Egon Dejonckheere, Merijn Mestdagh, Marlies Houben, Isa Rutten, Laura Sels, Peter Kuppens & Francis Tuerlinckx

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Contributions

M.M. performed the analyses and E.D. drafted the manuscript. Both authors conceptualized the study project and interpreted the results under P.K. and F.T.’s supervision. I.R. independently re-analysed parts of the data with different statistical software to achieve converging results. M.H. and L.S. critically revised the manuscript. All authors approved the final version of the article.

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Correspondence to Egon Dejonckheere or Merijn Mestdagh.

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Dejonckheere, E., Mestdagh, M., Houben, M. et al. Complex affect dynamics add limited information to the prediction of psychological well-being. Nat Hum Behav 3, 478–491 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-019-0555-0

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