Ricerc@Sapienza

Emotion dynamics, how people¿s emotions fluctuate across time, represent a key source of information about people¿s psychological functioning and well-being. A key component of emotional dynamics is represented by emotional inertia, which refers to the degree of which a current emotional state can be predicted by a previous emotional state. Despite considerable evidence to support that inertia represents a relevant marker of psychological maladjustment, its correlates at a physiological level are yet to be cleared. In addition, the few studies about emotional inertia in the workplace indicate that it is associated by work related stress (i.e., exhaustion). The aim of this project is to investigate inertia of negative emotions at work and its association to physiological activation in terms of heart rate. As previous studies suggest that high emotional inertia is related to several 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), we hypothesize that high inertia of negative emotions may be related to autonomic inflexibility (i.e., lower heart rate variability). Following experience sampling method, workers will (1) complete six brief questionnaires per day, for five working days, (2) wear a heart rate monitor for 24 consecutive hours. To our knowledge, this will be the first study addressing this research question in the workplace.