Not only how good or bad people feel on average, but also how their feelings fluctuate across time is crucial for psychological health. The last 2 decades have witnessed a surge in research linking various patterns of short-term emotional change to adaptive or maladaptive psychological functioning, often with conflicting results. A meta-analysis was performed to identify consistent relationships between patterns of short-term emotion dynamics-including patterns reflecting emotional variability (measured in terms of within-person standard deviation of emotions across time), emotional instability (measured in terms of the magnitude of consecutive emotional changes), and emotional inertia of emotions over time (measured in terms of autocorrelation)-and relatively stable indicators of psychological well-being or psychopathology. We determined how such relationships are moderated by the type of emotional change, type of psychological well-being or psychopathology involved, valence of the emotion, and methodological factors. A total of 793 effect sizes were identified from 79 articles (N = 11,381) and were subjected to a 3-level meta-analysis. The results confirmed that overall, low psychological well-being co-occurs with more variable (overall ρ = -.178), unstable (overall ρ = -.205), but also more inert (overall ρ = -.151) emotions. These effect sizes were stronger when involving negative compared with positive emotions. Moreover, the results provided evidence for consistency across different types of psychological well-being and psychopathology in their relation with these dynamical patterns, although specificity was also observed. The findings demonstrate that psychological flourishing is characterized by specific patterns of emotional fluctuations across time, and provide insight into what constitutes optimal and suboptimal emotional functioning. (PsycINFO Database Record

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The relation between short-term emotion dynamics and psychological well-being: A meta-analysis

Research in organizational psychology has increasingly focused on understanding the determinants of "green" employee behavior. The present study used a daily diary design to investigate relationships between employees' daily affect, pro-environmental attitude, as well as daily task-related pro-environmental behavior (i.e., the extent to which employees complete required work tasks in environmentally friendly ways), and daily proactive pro-environmental behavior (i.e., the extent to which employees show personal initiative when acting in environmentally friendly ways at work). Fifty-six employees working in small businesses completed a baseline survey and two daily surveys over ten workdays. Daily unactivated positive affect and pro-environmental attitude positively predicted daily task-related pro-environmental behavior. In addition, daily activated positive affect positively predicted daily proactive pro-environmental behavior among employees with a less positive pro-environmental attitude but not among employees with a more positive pro-environmental attitude. These findings suggest that fostering pro-environmental attitudes and, to some extent, positive affect among employees could help organizations to promote pro-environmental behavior in the workplace.

Relationships between daily affect and pro‐environmental behavior at work: The moderating role of pro‐environmental attitude

This three-week longitudinal field study with an experimental intervention examines the association between daily events and employee stress and health, with a specific focus on positive events. Re...

Building Positive Resources: Effects of Positive Events and Positive Reflection on Work Stress and Health

In the organizational sciences, scholars are increasingly using experience sampling methods (ESM) to answer questions tied to intraindividual, dynamic phenomenon. However, employing this method to ...

Experience Sampling Methods: A Discussion of Critical Trends and Considerations for Scholarly Advancement:

The use of experience sampling methods (ESM) and related techniques has exploded in organizational research. The goals of this review are to provide a focused perspective on the state of the art in using ESM and set the stage for what ESM will look like in the years to come. First, I provide a conceptually based discussion of exactly what is and what is not ESM. Next, I discuss the more advantageous elements of ESM that have surfaced from the range of disciplines that enjoy its use (e.g., reduced memory and methods biases), followed by the inevitable challenges that have sometimes limited its utility (e.g., issues with repeated assessment, missing data, and internal validity). Finally, I discuss three innovations of ESM (e.g., trait assessment, expansion to higher levels of analysis, and connection to big data) that seem likely to ensure its continued and expanded influence as a common tool for examining not only within-person psychological processes at work, but higher levels of analysis as well.

ESM 2.0: State of the Art and Future Potential of Experience Sampling Methods in Organizational Research

Daily affect often is determined by unpredictable events, but also has predictable components. We describe how the simultaneous modeling of overall affect level, cyclical variation in affect, and the occurrence of affective events can provide a clearer understanding of how affective well-being fluctuates over time. We examined intrinsic task motivation as a positive affective event, and had an opportunity to examine a single large negative affective event as well. Specifically, data collection was interrupted by a hurricane which made landfall very close to the data collection site, disrupting the lives of employees for weeks or months. We hypothesized that affect spin—an individual difference measure of variability in the affect circumplex—would increase reactions both to positive and negative affective events. These ideas were examined with 65 employees who provided daily ratings of affect for 21 days. Positive affect was influenced by several factors, whereas negative affect was less predictable. Affect spin moderated many of the dynamic components of daily positive affect, largely supporting the notion that affect spin reflects sensitivity both to positive and negative affective events. Discussion centers on the utility of incorporating dynamic accounts of affect in the study of well-being and work. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Louma Ghandour

Papers

Stability, change, and the stability of change in daily workplace affect