Emotions in Everyday Life

PLoS One. 2015 Dec 23;10(12):e0145450. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0145450. eCollection 2015.

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.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Activities of Daily Living*
  • Adolescent
  • Adult
  • Aged
  • Aged, 80 and over
  • Emotions / physiology*
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Male
  • Middle Aged
  • Surveys and Questionnaires
  • Young Adult

Grants and funding

JQ was supported by the Barcelona School of Management and grant PSI2013-41909-P from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Education. MT was supported by the Helaers Foundation. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.