Bursts of Self-Conscious Emotions in the Daily Lives of Emerging Adults

Abstract

Self-conscious emotions play a role in regulating daily achievement strivings, social behavior, and health, but little is known about the processes underlying their daily manifestation. Emerging adults (n = 182) completed daily diaries for 8 days and multilevel models were estimated to evaluate whether, how much, and why their emotions varied from day to day. Within-person variation in authentic pride was normally distributed across people and days, whereas the other emotions were burst-like and characterized by zero-inflated, negative binomial distributions. Perceiving social interactions as generally communal increased the odds of hubristic pride activation and reduced the odds of guilt activation; daily communal behavior reduced guilt intensity. Results illuminated processes through which meaning about the self in relation to others is constructed during a critical period of development.

Keywords::

• Emotion regulation
• Motivation
• Social
• Intraindividual

This work was supported by the Penn State Social Science Research Institute and the National Institutes of Health [grant number RC1 AG035645], [grant number R01 HD076994], [grant number R24 HD041025], and [grant number UL TR000127] from the National Institute for Aging, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institute for Research Resources and the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.