Negative Emotion Transitions May Have Immediate Benefits in Decreasing Negative Emotions in Daily Life
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Negative emotions can change from one type to another, such as transitioning from anger to sadness. Negative emotion transitions reflect affective flexibility. With transitions, individuals process emotions sequentially: They become aware of the needs tied to each emotion and develop clear action tendencies, which together is expected to increase the likelihood of reducing the overall intensity of negative emotions. The immediate benefit of negative emotion transitions in reducing emotion intensity has been demonstrated in psychotherapy for depressed individuals. However, it remains unclear whether negative emotion transitions have similar immediate benefits in reducing emotion intensity in daily life among young adults in the general population, a group that tends to experience frequent and intense negative emotions that demand regulation and is at risk of depressive symptoms. To answer this, the current study analyzes experience sampling data of negative emotions in the daily lives of three community samples of young adults with varying levels of depressive symptoms (final total N = 365, n = 17,587 observations). Consistent across all three samples, negative emotion transitions were significantly associated with reduction in overall negative emotion intensity. Moreover, such reductions were larger among young adults with higher depressive symptoms. These findings highlight a potentially valuable process that is concurrent to reductions in negative emotion intensity: Transitioning into different negative emotions. For young adults with some depressive symptoms, rather than focusing solely on what reduces negative emotion intensity, it may be beneficial to explore what facilitates negative emotion transitions in their daily life.
