The tendency to fell bad explains why individuals tend to feel sad, angry, and afraid across time

What is it about?

We examine why different emotions tend to co-occur across time. One perspective has been that negative feelings are unrelated to positive feelings across time. This perspective has become part of the dominant Big-Five theory of personality. However, much of the findings that support this perspective rely on self-ratings. Diener and colleagues in 1995 looked at this relationship using friends and family as judges to combine with self-ratings. They found that when you control for the biased way people respond to questions about themselves, having more positive feelings tends to predict having less negative feelings across time and vice versa. We repeated and expand on this discovery. We also find this negative relationship between feeling good and feeling bad across time. Beyond this we explicitly asked participants about how pleasant or unpleasant their feelings were over time. The tendency to fell unpleasant explains why individuals tend to feel sad, angry, and afraid across time even though few experiences would make a person feel all three of these negative feelings. All together these findings imply that popular models of emotion and of personality need to be updated

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Photo by Tengyart on Unsplash

Photo by Tengyart on Unsplash