Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences - Research Publications

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Author: Kalokerinos, Elise × Author: Koval, Peter × End date: 2022 × Start date: 2020 × Type: Journal Article ×

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    Some Recommendations on the Use of Daily Life Methods in Affective Science
    Kuppens, P ; Dejonckheere, E ; Kalokerinos, EK ; Koval, P (SPRINGERNATURE, 2022-06)
    Real-world emotions are often more vivid, personally meaningful, and consequential than those evoked in the lab. Therefore, studying emotions in daily life is essential to test theories, discover new phenomena, and understand healthy emotional functioning; in short, to move affective science forward. The past decades have seen a surge of research using daily diary, experience sampling, or ecological momentary assessment methods to study emotional phenomena in daily life. In this paper, we will share some of the insights we have gained from our collective experience applying such daily life methods to study everyday affective processes. We highlight what we see as important considerations and caveats involved in using these methods and formulate recommendations to improve their use in future research. These insights focus on the importance of (i) theory and hypothesis-testing; (ii) measurement; (iii) timescale; and (iv) context, when studying emotions in their natural habitat.
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    Social Support Predicts Differential Use, but not Differential Effectiveness, of Expressive Suppression and Social Sharing in Daily Life
    Pauw, LS ; Medland, H ; Paling, SJ ; Moeck, EK ; Greenaway, KH ; Kalokerinos, EK ; Hinton, JDX ; Hollenstein, T ; Koval, P (SPRINGERNATURE, 2022-09)
    UNLABELLED: While emotion regulation often happens in the presence of others, little is known about how social context shapes regulatory efforts and outcomes. One key element of the social context is social support. In two experience sampling studies (Ns = 179 and 123), we examined how the use and affective consequences of two fundamentally social emotion-regulation strategies-social sharing and expressive suppression-vary as a function of perceived social support. Across both studies, we found evidence that social support was associated with variation in people's use of these strategies, such that when people perceived their environments as being higher (vs. lower) in social support, they engaged in more sharing and less suppression. However, we found only limited and inconsistent support for context-dependent affective outcomes of suppression and sharing: suppression was associated with better affective consequences in the context of higher perceived social support in Study 1, but this effect did not replicate in Study 2. Taken together, these findings suggest that the use of social emotion-regulation strategies may depend on contextual variability in social support, whereas their effectiveness does not. Future research is needed to better understand the circumstances in which context-dependent use of emotion regulation may have emotional benefits, accounting for personal, situational, and cultural factors. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42761-022-00123-8.
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    Neuroticism may not reflect emotional variability
    Kalokerinos, EK ; Murphy, SC ; Koval, P ; Bailen, NH ; Crombez, G ; Hollenstein, T ; Gleeson, J ; Thompson, RJ ; Van Ryckeghem, DML ; Kuppens, P ; Bastian, B (NATL ACAD SCIENCES, 2020-04-28)
    Neuroticism is one of the major traits describing human personality, and a predictor of mental and physical disorders with profound public health significance. Individual differences in emotional variability are thought to reflect the core of neuroticism. However, the empirical relation between emotional variability and neuroticism may be partially the result of a measurement artifact reflecting neuroticism's relation with higher mean levels-rather than greater variability-of negative emotion. When emotional intensity is measured using bounded scales, there is a dependency between variability and mean levels: at low (or high) intensity, it is impossible to demonstrate high variability. As neuroticism is positively associated with mean levels of negative emotion, this may account for the relation between neuroticism and emotional variability. In a metaanalysis of 11 studies (N = 1,205 participants; 83,411 observations), we tested whether the association between neuroticism and negative emotional variability was clouded by a dependency between variability and the mean. We found a medium-sized positive association between neuroticism and negative emotional variability, but, when using a relative variability index to correct for mean negative emotion, this association disappeared. This indicated that neuroticism was associated with experiencing more intense, but not more variable, negative emotions. Our findings call into question theory, measurement scales, and data suggesting that emotional variability is central to neuroticism. In doing so, they provide a revisionary perspective for understanding how this individual difference may predispose to mental and physical disorders.