Emotional regularity: associations with personality, psychological health, and occupational outcomes

ABSTRACT

Emotional regularity is the degree to which a person maintains and returns to a set of emotional states over time. The present investigation examined associations between emotional regularity and extant emotion measures as well as psychologically relevant dimensions of personality, health, and real-world occupational outcomes. Participants included 598 U.S. adults who provided daily experience sampling reports on their emotional states for approximately two months. Results suggest that emotional regularity was related to, but distinct from, well-established measures of emotion including emotional intensity, variability, covariation, inertia, granularity, and emodiversity. Furthermore, emotional regularity significantly predicted measures of personality, psychological health, and occupational outcomes even when accounting for extant emotion measures and sociodemographic covariates. Finally, it explained modest (7.5%) improvement (in terms of cross-validated RSq.) over baseline models containing emotional intensity, variability, and sociodemographic covariates. These findings suggest that emotional regularity may provide an important indicator of healthy emotional functioning and may be a promising area for further scientific discovery.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotion
• emotional complexity
• emotion dynamics
• recurrence quantification analysis
• complex systems

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research is based upon work supported in part by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), via IARPA Contract No. 2017-17042800007, and the National Science Foundation (NSF; SES 2030599; SES 1928612) . The views and conclusions contained herein are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of ODNI, IARPA, NSF, or the U.S. Government. The U.S. Government is authorised to reproduce and distribute reprints for governmental purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation therein.