Moderating effects of mood monitoring on premenstrual dysphoria

Abstract

Twenty-two self-reported premenstrual syndrome sufferers made 2-hourly ratings of affect and affect regulation for 31 days. Happiness and calmness were depressed during the premenstrual phase for high mood monitors but enhanced for low mood monitors. High mood monitors also reported increased use of reappraisal to regulate their premenstrual affect. However, the impact of the premenstrual phase on high mood monitors’ affect was not mediated by changes in affect regulation. These findings suggest that mood monitoring leads to both more negative interpretations of affect changes during the premenstrual phase and to parallel changes in regulation style.

Notes

¹This procedure may have resulted in the miscoding of phases for a small proportion of data-points associated with participants experiencing menstrual cycles of greater or less than 28 days. Working on the assumption that their cycles were at least 21 days in length, we checked for potential effects of miscoding by excluding datapoints originally coded as intermenstrual that fell more than 21 days prior to the coded endpoint of the menstrual phase or more than 21 days after the first coded day of the premenstrual phase, as well as those days that had been coded as premenstrual at the end of the diary period because they fell 14 days after the last coded day of the reported menstrual phase (to deal with the potential problem of cycles longer than 28 days). The pattern of results after exclusion of these potentially miscoded datapoints from relevant analyses was practically identical to that reported here. All significant effects were replicated apart from the that of the interaction of MM and PMP on cognitive distraction.

²This result should be treated with caution because it was not replicated in the reanalysis described in note 1.