Reactivity to stressor pile-up in adulthood: Effects on daily negative and positive affect.

Abstract

This study used data from a 30-day diary study with 289 adults (age range 18-89 years) to model the effects of stressor pile-up on individuals' daily negative affect (NA) and positive affect (PA) and to test for age differences in these effects. Specifically, we developed a new approach to operationalize and model stressor pile-up and evaluated this approach using generalized mixed models, taking into account the gamma response distribution of the highly skewed daily NA data. Findings showed that pile-up of stressors over a 1-week period was significantly coupled with increases in individuals' daily NA above and beyond the effect of concurrent stressors. Findings also showed that the effects of stressor accumulation and concurrent stress were additive rather than multiplicative. Age interacted significantly with stressor accumulation so that a higher age was associated with less NA reactivity to stressor pile-up. Yet, we did not find such an age-related association for NA reactivity to concurrent daily stressors. Daily PA was not associated with daily stress or with stressor pile-up. The operational definition of stressor pile-up presented in this study contributes to the literature by providing a new approach to model the dynamic effects of stress, and by providing new ways of separating the effects of acute stressors from the effects of stressor pile-up. The age differences found in the present study suggest that older adults develop effective emotion regulation skills for handling stressor pile-up, but that they react to acute daily stressors in a similar way than younger adults.

Psychological vulnerability to daily stressors in old age

“…Thus, PA responses to daily stressors must be considered to be diverse across stressors and individuals, making a clearcut theoretical expectation of stressor reactivity of PA impossible. Indeed, EMA studies have shown inconsistent findings on stressor reactivity of PA where some showed a negative association between daily PA and daily stressors [22,40], some found no intraindividual coupling of daily stressors or negative events with daily PA [16,34] and one study even reported a positive effect of daily stressors on daily PA [46]. Moreover, one study reported PA to be negatively associated with negative daily events among young but not old individuals [33], whereas another study found a negative association …”

“…a personal characteristic, such as age, gender, personality trait or health indicator, that might have an impact on the person's self-regulative skills and capacity to deal with everyday challenges and thus increases or decreases the person's stressor reactivity, is added to model (1) as a predictor interacting with S di −S. i [4,10,12,13,18,20,26,33,34,45,46].…”

Different Psychosocial Factors Are Associated with Seasonal and Perennial Allergies in Adults: Cross-Sectional Results of the KORA FF4 Study

“…Retirement might also be associated with less psychosocial stress because retired people are relieved from work-related strain [35]. Another possible explanation is that stress coping skills increase with the age [36]. Moreover, it might represent a generational divide as younger adults rather report mental health issues than older adults, for example, because some older adults have a negative stereotype about mental illness [37] or they do not perceive their problems severe enough to report [38].…”

Capturing Context-Related Change in Emotional Dynamics via Fixed Moderated Time Series Analysis

“…The continuous moderator is a smoothed version of the dichotomous moderator and is obtained by calculating a moving average with a window size of seven occasions (cf. Schilling & Diehl, 2014). We display the formula in the empirical illustration section of the paper (cf.…”

“…For the continuous moderator case (Model 3), we calculate a linear weighted moving average of relevant negative events as an index of "stressor pile-up" (Schilling & Diehl, 2014) as…”