Emotional inertia and psychological maladjustment

By Peter Kuppens, Nicholas B. Allen, Lisa B. Sheeber. Psychology Science, 2010

655 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this article, we examine the concept of emotional inertia as a fundamental property of the emotion dynamics that characterize psychological maladjustment. Emotional inertia refers to the degree to which emotional states are resistant to change. Because psychological maladjustment has been associated with both emotional underreactivity and ineffective emotion-regulation skills, we hypothesized that its overall emotion dynamics would be characterized by high levels of inertia. We provide evidence from two naturalistic studies that, using different methods, showed that the emotional fluctuations of individuals who exhibited low self-esteem (Study 1) and depression (Study 2) were characterized by higher levels of inertia in both positive and negative emotions than the emotional fluctuations of people who did not exhibit low self-esteem and depression. We also discuss the usefulness of the concept of emotional inertia as a hallmark of maladaptive emotion dynamics.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e1bb7b6c41a9bdd46c92e1a6e4fab070c76a5e58

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Citations in the corpus

Emotion Regulation Flexibility (2014, background): “…including attention (e.g., Koster et al. 2009; Hallion and Ruscio 2011; Calcott and Berkman in press), executive control (e.g., Williams et al. 1996; Etkin et al. 2006), goal pursuit (e.g., Wrosch et al. 2003), and affect (e.g., Rottenberg et al. 2005; Cunningham et al. 2008; Kuppens et al. 2010).”
Mental disorders as networks of problems: a review of recent insights (2016, positive): “While further investigations are required to understand the nature of emotional inertia, it has been considered ‘‘a hallmark of maladaptive emotion dynamics’’ [27] (p.”
A Model of Socioemotional Flexibility at Three Time Scales (2013, background): “Recently, Kuppens and colleagues have explored context insensitivity through the construct of emotional inertia (Suls, Green, & Hillis, 1998) in adolescence (Kuppens et al., 2010; Kuppens et al., 2012).”
Affect spin, entrepreneurs' well-being, and venture goal progress: The moderating role of goal orientation (2017, background): “…of affect (DynAffect) theory which provides a theoretical account of individual differences in the temporal dynamics of affective experiences (Kuppens et al., 2010b) and the self-regulation perspective that contends affect spin requires and consumes psychological resources (Beal et al.,…”
Modeling Affect Dynamics: State of the Art and Future Challenges (2015, methodology): “However, in practice data with unequal intervals are often analyzed using models that are based on the assumption of equal time intervals (Kuppens et al., 2010), which may be particularly problematic when the focus is on lagged effects between variables (see Oravecz & Tuerlinckx, 2011, for some…”
Beneath the Tip of the Iceberg: Current Challenges and New Directions in Sentiment Analysis Research (2020, background): “Selfdependency, also known as emotional inertia, deals with the aspect of influence that speakers have on themselves during conversations (Kuppens et al., 2010).”
AVEC 2019 Workshop and Challenge: State-of-Mind, Detecting Depression with AI, and Cross-Cultural Affect Recognition (2019, background): “chine learning is applied to raw values, the intra-individual autocorrelation of emotion, the so-called emotional inertia, is portrayed in the dynamic evaluation [35].”
Micro-Level Affect Dynamics in Psychopathology Viewed From Complex Dynamical System Theory (2015, positive): “Inertia of momentary affective states is associated with current state of depression (Kuppens et al., 2010), general psychological complaints (Wigman, van Os, et al., 2013), the tendency to ruminate on negative thoughts (Koval et al., 2012), and predicts onset of depression (Kuppens et al., 2012).”
Emotion Recognition in Conversation: Research Challenges, Datasets, and Recent Advances (2019, background): “Self-dependency, also known as emotional inertia, deals with the aspect of emotional influence that speakers have on themselves during conversations [33].”
Critical slowing down as early warning for the onset and termination of depression (2013, result): “The relationship between elevated temporal correlations and upcoming transitions we detected is also consistent with independent earlier studies, showing that “ emotional inertia ” (slower rates of change in emotion scores) is associated with future transition into a more depressed state (45, 46).”
Looking at Emotion Regulation Through the Window of Emotion Dynamics (2015, background): “Theoretically, emotional inertia was conceived to reflect both decreased emotional reactivity and impaired emotion regulation skills (Kuppens et al., 2010), but empirically, inertia seems to mainly and most consistently stem from difficulties regulating one’s emotions (Koval et al.”
ICON: Interactive Conversational Memory Network for Multimodal Emotion Detection (2018, background): “Self-dependencies, also known as emotional inertia, deal with the aspect of emotional influence that speakers have on themselves during conversations (Kuppens et al., 2010).”