Cognitive psychology

Life satisfaction

Communication

Statistics

Social psychology

Dynamics (music)

Accounting

Pedagogy

Psychological well-being

Computer science

Business

Variance (accounting)

Well-being

Psychology

Mathematics

Political science

Value (mathematics)

Psychotherapist

Interdependence

Affect (linguistics)

Nature Human Behaviour

Over the years, many studies have demonstrated a relation between emotion dynamics and psychological well-being1. Because our emotional life is inherently time-dynamic2–6, affective scientists argue that, next to how positive or negative we feel on average, patterns of emotional change are informative for mental health7–10. This growing interest initiated a surge in new affect dynamic measures, each claiming to capture a unique dynamical aspect of our emotional life, crucial for understanding well-being. Although this accumulation suggests scientific progress, researchers have not always evaluated (a) how different affect dynamic measures empirically interrelate and (b) what their added value is in the prediction of psychological well-being. Here, we address these questions by analysing affective time series data from 15 studies (n = 1,777). We show that (a) considerable interdependencies between measures exist, suggesting that single dynamics often do not convey unique information, and (b) dynamic measures have little added value over mean levels of positive and negative affect (and variance in these affective states) when predicting individual differences in three indicators of well-being (life satisfaction, depressive symptoms and borderline symptoms). Our findings indicate that conventional emotion research is currently unable to demonstrate independent relations between affect dynamics and psychological well-being. Research into emotion dynamics and well-being has, over the years, used an increasing number of dynamic measures to capture emotional change. Dejonckheere et al. show that these measures add little to the information conveyed by mean affect and its variance.

Complex affect dynamics add limited information to the prediction of psychological well-being