Abstract
Previous research has shown that being affectively unstable is an indicator of several forms of psychological maladjustment. However, little is known about the mechanisms underlying affective instability. Our research aims to examine the possibility that being prone to extreme fluctuations in one’s feelings is related to maladaptive emotion regulation. We investigated this hypothesis by relating affective instability, assessed in daily life using the experience sampling method, to self-reported emotion regulation strategies and to parasympathetically mediated heart rate variability (HRV), a physiological indicator of emotion regulation capacity. Results showed that HRV was negatively related to instability of positive affect (as measured by mean square successive differences), indicating that individuals with lower parasympathetic tone are emotionally less stable, particularly for positive affect.
Highlights
Everyone’s feelings change, some individuals are more affectively labile than others and experience larger and more frequent changes in affect
Positive affect (PA) mean level was negatively associated with PA and negative affect (NA) instability, there was only conclusive evidence for the latter (p < .05)
This study investigated how affective instability in daily life is related to self-reported emotion regulation and to a physiological indicator of emotion regulation capacity, namely vagally mediated heart rate variability (HRV)
Summary
Everyone’s feelings change, some individuals are more affectively labile than others and experience larger and more frequent changes in affect. In this paper we examine the possibility that being prone to large fluctuations in one’s feelings is related to self-reported use of emotion regulation (reappraisal and suppression) as well as to a physiological measure of emotion regulation capacity, parasympathetically mediated heart rate variability (HRV). This study investigated how affective instability is related to self-reported use of emotion regulation strategies and parasympathetically mediated HRV. We measured both positive and negative affective instability using the experience sampling method (ESM) [55], which provided repeated assessments of people’s affective experiences as they naturally occurred in daily life. Based on the previously described theoretical and empirical literature, we hypothesized that reappraisal and vagally mediated HRV would be negatively related to affective instability
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