A psychological flexibility perspective on well-being: Emotional reactivity, adaptive choices, and daily experiences.

Abstract

According to psychological flexibility theory, fully experiencing one's emotions, even when they involve negative reactions, can enhance psychological well-being. In pursuit of this possibility, procedures capable of disentangling reaction intensities from reaction durations, in response to affective images, were developed and variations of this paradigm were applied in understanding variations in happiness and adaptive behavior. Consistent with psychological flexibility theory, three studies showed that more intense emotional reactions, irrespective of valence, were associated with higher levels of wellbeing. Two additional studies showed that happy individuals, relative to less happy individuals, exhibited more functional approach/avoidance behavior in behavior-focused tasks. Together, the results are consistent with the idea that adaptive emotion generation systems are those that flexibly adapt emotion output to concurrent emotion-related stimulation. The program of research adds to our understanding of the relationship between emotion reactivity and well-being while highlighting specific processes through which emotion and well-being interact.

The Role of Emotion-Regulation Strategies in Emotional Inertia: Testing a Within-Person Mediation Model

“…Broadly, our findings demonstrate that NA has a self-reinforcing quality and operates in a vicious cycle with regulation attempts in daily life (Pavani et al, 2017). Psychological flexibility theory states that an adaptive emotion system is one that changes flexibly in response to changing environmental inputs and regulation attempts (Klein et al, 2023). Our work affirms that strategies typically categorised as maladaptive (i.e., rumination and suppression) reinforce NA, leading to emotional vicious cycles.…”

Second-to-Second Affective Responses to Images Correspond With Affective Reactivity, Variability, and Instability in Daily Life

“…In the DART paradigm, means for positive and negative intensity peaks were positively correlated, r = .37, p < .001, implicating individual differences that matter for both valences (Klein et al, 2022). Correlations among variability and instability indices are reported in Table 1.…”

“…The present iteration of the Dynamic Affect Reactivity Task (DART) paradigm was designed to capture subjective affective responses to controlled/normed stimuli while achieving the temporal resolution necessary to determine the precise time point and intensity at which affect reactions peaked. To accomplish such goals, the DART (Klein et al, 2022; Robinson et al, 2021) presented visual stimuli while recording micro-momentary changes in state affect 10 times per second. Previous research supports the validity of these procedures and the indices that result from them.…”

“…Indeed, making distinctions related to valence is fundamental to emotion science (Barrett, 2006). At the same time, reactivity parameters can be positively correlated (Klein et al, 2022) and the same is true concerning affect dynamic indices from daily life protocols (Koval, Ogrinz, et al, 2013). Furthermore, there are individual difference factors such as affect intensity that predict intense responses to both positive and negative events (Larsen & Diener, 1987).…”

“…To capture peak reactivity, within these protocols, would require assessments that are precisely timed to index peak reactions. If measurements occurred outside of the narrow window of peak reactivity, the relevant indices may capture some uncertain combination of peak intensity and reaction duration, probably weighted toward the latter (Klein et al, 2022). From this perspective, it may be crucial to pair experience sampling or daily diary protocols with laboratory-based procedures that can disentangle peaks from durations due to their much greater temporal resolution.…”