title: Emotions in Everyday Life.
abstract: Despite decades of research establishing the causes and consequences of emotions in the laboratory, we know surprisingly little about emotions in everyday life. We developed a smartphone application that monitored real-time emotions of an exceptionally large (N = 11,000+) and heterogeneous participants sample. People's everyday life seems profoundly emotional: participants experienced at least one emotion 90% of the time. The most frequent emotion was joy, followed by love and anxiety. People experienced positive emotions 2.5 times more often than negative emotions, but also experienced positive and negative emotions simultaneously relatively frequently. We also characterized the interconnections between people's emotions using network analysis. This novel approach to emotion research suggests that specific emotions can fall into the following categories 1) connector emotions (e.g., joy), which stimulate same valence emotions while inhibiting opposite valence emotions, 2) provincial emotions (e.g., gratitude), which stimulate same valence emotions only, or 3) distal emotions (e.g., embarrassment), which have little interaction with other emotions and are typically experienced in isolation. Providing both basic foundations and novel tools to the study of emotions in everyday life, these findings demonstrate that emotions are ubiquitous to life and can exist together and distinctly, which has important implications for both emotional interventions and theory.
authors.affiliation: Department of Marketing, Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Debra
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Trampe
authors.affiliation: Department of Economics and Business, Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, Spain.
authors.forename: Jordi
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Quoidbach
authors.affiliation: Computational Radiology Laboratory, Boston Children's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, United States of America.
authors.forename: Maxime
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Taquet
mesh_terms: D000203:Activities of Daily Living; D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D055815:Young Adult