How do changes in social desire and social contact frequency relate to momentary affect?

What is it about?

Social interactions are important to our emotional well-being. At the same time, how much social contact people desire differs both over time and from person to person. Here, we investigated how the emotional well-being changes when there is a mismatch between how much social contact people engage in and how much they desire in this moment. To do this, we collected data from German-speaking participants (N = 306, 51% women, mean age = 39.41, age range 18–80 years). These participants answered up to 20 momentary questionnaires about social interactions and affect. In addition, mobile sensing tracked their conversations, calls, and app usage over 2 days. With these data, we investigated how momentary emotional well-being relates to social dynamics, focusing on two states of mismatch between social desire and social contact: social deprivation (i.e., being alone but desiring more social contact) and social oversatiation (i.e., being in contact but desiring to be alone). We used different techniques to gauge the robustness of our findings. Social oversatiation was associated with decreased positive emotions and increased negative emotions. Social deprivation, however, was unrelated to emotional states in our data. Further analyses showed that a higher desire to be alone was consistently associated with decreased emotional well-being, whereas a higher desire for social contact was related to increased emotional well-being. Mobile sensing data revealed further association patterns between emotional states and face-to-face versus digital communication. We discuss implications for theories on how social needs are regulated in daily life. We also contextualize how our findings relate to studies on voluntary solitude. Finally, we describe advantages of combining experience sampling and mobile sensing assessments.

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Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash

Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash

Why is it important?

On the one hand, it is important to consider the role of social desire when investigating the relation of social contact and affective states. To do this, we assessed social desire, social interactions, and momentary affect in daily life in an age-diverse sample. Thereby, we were able to analyse the effects of states of mismatch between social desire and social contact on affect (i.e., either less social contact that desired or more social contact than desired). On the other hand, we add to the growing body of research that combines experience sampling (in-the-moment self-reports) with behavioral data obtained from mobile phone logs and sensors. Using these measures of social contact from from mobile phones may help in overcoming biases associated with self-reports.

Perspectives