A daily within-person investigation on the link between social expectancies to be busy and emotional wellbeing: the moderating role of emotional complexity acceptance

ABSTRACT

With postmodern societies placing a strong emphasis on making full use of one’s time, it is increasingly common to extol busy individuals as more achieving. In this context, although feeling a social expectation to be busy might imply that individuals are regarded as competent and desirable, its accompanying stressors may also detrimentally impact their mental health. Utilising data from a seven-day diary study, the current research examined the relationship between people’s daily perceived pressure to be busy and their daily emotional wellbeing. Multilevel modelling revealed that daily social pressure to be busy was a significant predictor of daily negative affect, anxiety, and depressive symptoms at the within-person level. Of import, individuals’ trait emotional complexity acceptance moderated these relationships, with those lower on emotional complexity acceptance reporting significantly higher negative affect, anxiety, and depressive symptoms on days they felt greater social pressure to be busy. These effects were not observed among those higher on emotional complexity acceptance. Together, the current findings suggest that social pressure to feel busy is generally related to poorer daily emotional wellbeing, and that those with higher trait emotional complexity acceptance have an advantage of maintaining their emotional wellbeing in the face of such a social pressure.

KEYWORDS:

• Social pressure to be busy
• emotional wellbeing
• emotional complexity acceptance
• daily diary
• multilevel modelling

Acknowledgements

We thank Dr. Egon Dejonckheere for suggesting the use of the leave-one-out multiverse analysis and post-hoc power analysis in the current work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Declaration of Interest

The authors report no conflict of interest.

Notes

1 Supporting this argument, we conducted a qualitative study with 148 Americans of a similar age range as the participants in the main study. Two independent coders (inter-rater agreement = .86) coded the open-ended responses regarding how participants feel towards the social expectation to be busy. Results showed that a substantial proportion of participants (33.8%) expressed feeling mixed emotions (e.g. “I like the feeling of being in demand, but at the same time, it would weigh on me mentally”).

2 The emotional complexity acceptance scale is made up of two dimensions—personal expectancies and perceived social expectancies. Analyses using each subscale (available in ResearchBox #234) yielded results similar to those reported in this paper that aggregated across the two dimensions.

3 Analyses using the four-item measure of perceived social pressure to be busy (ResearchBox #234) yielded largely similar results to those reported later in this paper.

4 Although the within-person consistencies of these scales appear to be less than ideal, we posit that it may be due to high day-to-day fluctuations of anxiety and depression among our participants. We found that dropping items to improve the reliability of these measures did not affect the results reported in the manuscript (see ResearchBox #234 for detailed descriptions and supplemental analyses).

5 The distribution of random effects of our within-person models for each outcome variable are available on ResearchBox #234.

6 Analyses using the four-item measure of perceived social pressure to be busy revealed that the daily social pressure to be busy was significantly negatively associated with daily positive affect in the within-person and moderated models (ResearchBox #234; Tables S9-10). The results for all other outcomes and models were consistent with those reported in the manuscript.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by grants from the Ministry of Education Academy Research Fund Tier 1, awarded to Andree Hartanto by the Singapore Management University (20-C242-SMU-001; 21-SOSS-SMU-023). The sponsors had no role in the design, execution, interpretation, or writing of the study.