No Evidence that Continuous Affect Ratings Offer a Meaningful Measure of Affective Inertia

Affective inertia – the extent to which changes in one’s affective state persist over time – isan important feature of affect dynamics. It is often examined using experience sampling studies thatcapture momentary affect multiple times per day for multiple consecutive days. Intensity profiledrawings were recently introduced as a continuous measure of affect in everyday life. While addingcontinuous intensity profile drawings to discrete, momentary affect ratings offers detailed insightsinto temporal affect trajectories in between beeps, it is not clear how a meaningful and informativemeasure of affect dynamics like inertia can be derived from it. In a secondary analysis, we comparedseveral operationalisations of affective inertia on two criteria: (1) how stable these estimates areover time, and (2) how effectively they capture individual differences that relate to depressionbeyond what can be explained by momentary affect ratings. Drawing-based estimates weregenerally more stable than those based on beeps but still failed to reach acceptable split-halfcorrelations. Moreover, they did not robustly explain additional variance in depressive symptomsbeyond beep-based metrics. Together, our results do not support the incremental validity ofintensity profile drawings compared to momentary assessments of affect in capturing affectiveinertia and its relationship with depression.