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  • Matters Arising
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Context matters for affective chronometry

Nature Human Behaviour volume 4, pages 688–689 (2020)Cite this article

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Matters Arising to this article was published on 27 April 2020

The Original Article was published on 15 April 2019

arising from E. Dejonckheere et al. Nature Human Behaviour https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-019-0555-0 (2019)

The emergence of mobile technology has resulted in an explosion of research tracking individuals’ everyday emotions using ecological momentary assessment (EMA), and has yielded a cornucopia of metrics to capture the temporal features of affect (hereafter affective dynamics). Dejonckheere, Mestdagh and colleagues conducted a timely and thoughtful meta-analysis to address which EMA metrics best predict psychopathology and well-being, and concluded that affective dynamics capture a negligible amount of variance in emotional well-being over and above mean levels of positive and negative affect1. Here we argue that context matters: the authors’ conclusion should be considered within the broader field of affective science examining the affective dynamics of subjective, physiological and neural responses surrounding affectively meaningful events. Although mean levels of affect collected at random may strongly correlate with depression and well-being, probing the recovery function of responses following discrete affective perturbations unveils unique insights into affective function and dysfunction, and may be more sensitive to the integrity and well-being of a system than its mean levels.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge support from grant number F32-MH113347 (R.C.L.) and from the John Templeton Foundation (A.S.H.). The funders had no role in the decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Regina C. Lapate

  2. Department of Psychology, University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL, USA

    Aaron S. Heller

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  1. Regina C. Lapate
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R.C.L. and A.S.H. wrote and finalized the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Regina C. Lapate or Aaron S. Heller.

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Lapate, R.C., Heller, A.S. Context matters for affective chronometry. Nat Hum Behav 4, 688–689 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-0860-7

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