Ricerc@Sapienza

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in understanding how individuals differ in the dynamics of their affective experiences. Indeed, fluctuations in people's emotional states over time may reveal information about their psychological functioning and well-being (Koval & Kuppens, 2012). In this regard, recent studies have focused on temporal dependency of emotions, namely emotional inertia. Emotional inertia refers to the rate of change in emotional experiences and it is generally operationalized as the autocorrelation of an emotion (Kuppens et al., 2010). Evidence indicates that high emotional inertia is related to a number of markers of psychological maladjustment such as neuroticism (Suls, Green, & Hillis, 1998), depression (Koval & Kuppens, 2012; Koval, Sütterlin, & Kuppens, 2015), low self-esteem (Kuppens et al., 2010) and rumination (Brose et al., 2015). In the light of these results, the present research project aim at expanding existing literature on emotional inertia by investigating its association with emotional exhaustion among a sample of Italian workers, which will be assessed six times per day for five working days. In accordance with the principles of COR Theory (Hobfoll, 1989), we expect that emotional exhaustion will be associated with higher emotional inertia. In particular, we hypothesize that individual high in emotional exhaustion may lack the resources to adapt their emotions to external events. Our hypothesis will be tested using multilevel modeling. To our knowledge, this will be the first study exploring emotional inertia in the work setting and its link with emotional exhaustion, the core dimension of burnout syndrome.