“…Within-person relations will also be called couplings in the following. Our interest was inspired by quasi-experimental studies showing a relationship between these variables; in particular, studies on performance deficits in people with depressive symptoms that point to the role of attentional and motivational deficits (e.g., Ellis & Ashbrook, 1988;Hertel & Rude, 1991), and experimental studies manipulating emotions that show reliable effects on cognitive performance (e.g., Ellis, Moore, Varner, Ottaway, & Becker, 1997;Richards & Gross, 2000). Critical questions that emerged when applying this background to the question of correlates of day-to-day variability of WM within individuals were (a) whether more subtle day-today fluctuations of, for example, negative affect are meaningful enough to impact on performance, especially in comparison to between-person differences in depressive symptoms; and (b) whether more generally, the mechanisms that are discussed as underlying relationships between variables operate similarly at the between-and the within-person level of analysis.…”