ArticleBMC medicine2026
Complex affect dynamics offer limited incremental value for cross-sectional prediction of psychological and behavioural variables in cross-validated models.
Article in BMC medicine, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
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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.
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10 authors.
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Abstract
backgroundThere is growing interest in the use of end-of-day dairies (EODD) as a means for quantifying how individuals' affective experiences fluctuate over time, and how such dynamics relate to mental health variables. A plethora of methods exist for precisely quantifying these affect dynamics, but recent work pooling data from multiple studies has suggested that most of the variance in outcome measures of depression, borderline symptoms, and life satisfaction is captured by simple measures, such as the mean (M) and standard deviation (SD) of affect ratings over time. Ever-more sophisticated approaches for measuring affect dynamics may offer little value for understanding mental health. Here, we examined a broad array of mental health variables and affect dynamic measures within a single cohort to comprehensively evaluate whether EODD-derived measures of affect dynamics are associated with specific psychopathological experiences.
methodsA total of 314 adults (97 males; aged 18-45 years) first completed a 2-hour online questionnaire comprising a comprehensive battery of psychometrically validated instruments assessing personality traits, mental health symptoms, life satisfaction, and various psychological factors, and subsequently completed 28 days of EODD assessments (M
resultsAcross all 117 variables, no complex affect dynamics measures improved cross-validated R² by more than 5.3 % beyond the M and SD of PA and NA.
conclusionsElaborate measures of affect dynamics, as indexed by the PANAS-10, offer minimal incremental explanatory power in predicting psychopathology beyond basic summary statistics of daily affect. These findings question the added value of increasingly complex measures of affect dynamics for predicting standard psychological and behavioral variables.
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