What is it about?
To understand emotions, it is critical to study how they change over time. Previous research already suggested that these changes are nonlinear in nature, but this finding can be confounded by the events that people encounter throughout the day. In this study, we show that emotions change in a nonlinear way over time, even when taking into account what happens to individuals on a day to day basis.
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Why is it important?
It is becoming increasingly clear that we should prevent rather than cure mental disorders such as depression. One way in which we might do so is by actively monitoring how people feel over time and intervening the moment we notice something might go wrong. Mathematical models such as the one used in this article are critical for such purposes, as they might be able to predict to onset of mental disorders. Using the predictions of a mathematical model, clinicians might be able to intervene before it is too late.
Perspectives
I hope that readers will enjoy the article and play with the idea that mathematical models can be applied to psychological topics. I believe in the promise such models hold to uncover the mechanisms that make up the human mind.
Niels Vanhasbroeck
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Nonlinearity in affect dynamics persists after accounting for the valence of daily-life events., Emotion, February 2024, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/emo0001336.
You can read the full text:
Resources
Stimulus-driven affective change: Evaluating computational models of affect dynamics in conjunction with input
Another article of ours that reports the same findings, but for experimental data.
Analysis code
Link to the open access code that we used to analyze the data. Data was only accessible to us on courtesy of the second author and can be made available upon request.
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
