ArticlePsychological medicine2021
Affect fluctuations examined with ecological momentary assessment in patients with current or remitted depression and anxiety disorders.
Article in Psychological medicine, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 75 papers, 3 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
75 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 134 citations in OpenAlex.
- Unpacking the components of positive affect variability: Implications for psychological health across contexts.Emotion (Washington, D.C.) · 2025Pooled it
- The role of affect in chronic pain: A systematic review of within-person symptom dynamics.Journal of psychosomatic research · 2021Pooled it
- A Systematic Review of Momentary Assessment Designs for Mood and Anxiety Symptoms.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Pooled it
- Momentary emotion-related distress, negative emotions, and suicidal ideation: Findings from an RCT among adults in inpatient psychiatric care.Journal of affective disorders · 2026Trial
- Optimizing just-in-time adaptive interventions for interpersonal distress: mechanisms, prediction, and the challenge of engagement.Scientific reports · 2026Trial
- Listen to Your Heart-Ecological Momentary Assessment of Interoceptive Accuracy, Awareness and Sensibility: A Pilot Study.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2021Trial
- Emotion dynamics as indicators of maladaptive emotions in patients with cancer.Supportive care in cancer : official journal of the Multinational Association of Supportive Care in Cancer · 2026Article
- Improving the comparability of momentary affect assessments and accounting for item-specific effects in within-person affect dynamics.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- Psychometric Properties of Ecological Momentary Assessment of Psychosocial Functioning in Adults With Complications Related to Type 1 Diabetes.Canadian journal of diabetes · 2026Article
- Digital mood phenotyping predicts short- and long-term suicidal ideation across a two-year timescale.Molecular psychiatry · 2026Article
- Goal disturbance and emotional symptoms in patients with cancer.Journal of behavioral medicine · 2026Article
- Complex affect dynamics offer limited incremental value for cross-sectional prediction of psychological and behavioural variables in cross-validated models.BMC medicine · 2026Article
- When Negative Emotions Stick Together: Interconnectedness Explains How Emotion Regulation Strategies Shape Distress.Journal of youth and adolescence · 2026Article
- Daily Negative Affect and Reaction Time Inconsistency in Emerging Adults: Ecological Momentary Assessment Study.JMIR mHealth and uHealth · 2026Article
- Characterizing emotion dynamics in remitted depression: A network approach using ecological momentary assessment.Journal of mood and anxiety disorders · 2026Article
- Group, Subgroup and Person-Specific Longitudinal Associations Between Physical Activity and Affect in Individuals With and Without Depressive and Anxiety Disorders.International journal of methods in psychiatric research · 2026Article
- Momentary anxiety and autonomic responses during everyday social interactions among patients with depression.Translational psychiatry · 2026Article
- How Variability Is Addressed in Interventions for Neurodiverse Conditions: Implications for Stuttering.Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR · 2026Article
- Interplay between resting heart rate variability, daily affective dynamics and mental health difficulties in autistic youths.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Examining varying number of intervention-modules and change in individual networks in young people remitted from depression or anxiety: Exploratory outcomes of the StayFine randomized clinical trial.Neuroscience applied · 2026Article
15 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
10 authors at 6 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundThere is increasing interest in day-to-day affect fluctuations of patients with depressive and anxiety disorders. Few studies have compared repeated assessments of positive affect (PA) and negative affect (NA) across diagnostic groups, and fluctuation patterns were not uniformly defined. The aim of this study is to compare affect fluctuations in patients with a current episode of depressive or anxiety disorder, in remitted patients and in controls, using affect instability as a core concept but also describing other measures of variability and adjusting for possible confounders.
methodsEcological momentary assessment (EMA) data were obtained from 365 participants of the Netherlands Study of Depression and Anxiety with current (n = 95), remitted (n = 178) or no (n = 92) DSM-IV defined depression/anxiety disorder. For 2 weeks, five times per day, participants filled-out items on PA and NA. Affect instability was calculated as the root mean square of successive differences (RMSSD). Tests on group differences in RMSSD, within-person variance, and autocorrelation were performed, controlling for mean affect levels.
resultsCurrent depression/anxiety patients had the highest affect instability in both PA and NA, followed by remitters and then controls. Instability differences between groups remained significant when controlling for mean affect levels, but differences between current and remitted were no longer significant.
conclusionsPatients with a current disorder have higher instability of NA and PA than remitted patients and controls. Especially with regard to NA, this could be interpreted as patients with a current disorder being more sensitive to internal and external stressors and having suboptimal affect regulation.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.