Dyadic Affective Flexibility and Emotional Inertia in Relation to Youth Psychopathology: An Integrated Model at Two Timescales

Abstract

The current review examines characteristics of temporal affective functioning at both the individual and dyadic level. Specifically, the review examines the following three research questions: (1) How are dyadic affective flexibility and emotional inertia operationalized, and are they related to youth psychopathology? (2) How are dyadic affective flexibility and emotional inertia related, and does this relation occur at micro- and meso-timescales? and (3) How do these constructs combine to predict clinical outcomes? Using the Flex3 model of socioemotional flexibility as a frame, the current study proposes that dyadic affective flexibility and emotional inertia are bidirectionally related at micro- and meso-timescales, which yields psychopathological symptoms for youth. Specific future directions for examining individual, dyadic, and cultural characteristics that may influence relations between these constructs and psychopathology are also discussed.

The Variability-Stability-Flexibility Pattern: A Possible Key to Understanding the Flexibility of the Human Mind

“…Instead of calling disparate abilities (e.g., flexible language and set shifting) cognitive flexibilities, flexibility as a property can be elegantly applied to all types of processing or mechanisms and to the cognitive system in general: All can be flexible. By avoiding the constant creation of new terms, such as dyadic affective flexibility, to refer to the ability of a dyad to make transitions between emotions and adapt them to situational demands (Mancini, & Luebbe, 2016), or cognitive-affective flexibility, to refer to the ability to shift between ways of processing emotional stimuli (Mȃrcuş, Stanciu, MacLeod, Liebregts, & Visu-Petra, 2016), the investigation of flexibility would become more precise. In the case of cognitive-affective flexibility, the term affective is justified through the use of affective stimuli in variations of classic shifting tasks, a situation named by other researchers "cognitive control in emotional and nonemotional contexts" (Cohen et al, 2016, p. 549).…”

Using the time‐varying autoregressive model to study dynamic changes in situation perceptions and emotional reactions

“…Adolescence is known as a "storm and stress" period, characterized by a greater instability mostly in emotions. The fact that inertia is linked to maladjustment among adolescents (e.g., Kuppens et al, 2012;Mancini & Luebbe, 2016;Neumann, Van Lier, Frijns, Meeus, & Koot, 2011) highlights the importance of studying the conditions under which it varies over time, to provide information that is useful for preventing the psychopathology onset.…”