Momentary Emotional Fingerprints of Internalizing Symptom Facets

Anxiety and depression are common and challenging to treat. Yet our understanding of the dynamic emotional processes that underlie internalizing illness remains incomplete, thwarting treatment development. Here, we used ecological momentary assessment to understand relations between real-world affective dynamics and specific internalizing facets in a young adult sample enriched for internalizing risk. Momentary reports of high average negative affect (NA) levels and low average positive affect (PA) levels were associated with elevated symptoms, broadly. Contrary to expectations, high PA variability, but not NA variability, evidenced a similarly broad profile of associations. Clustering analyses indicated that Panic and Suicidality, and separately, Dysphoria, Lassitude, and Social Anxiety shared common emotional fingerprints, marked by high average/low variability in NA, and high average NA/low average PA/high PA variability, respectively. These results provide a novel framework for understanding the everyday mood dynamics that underlie specific symptoms of internalizing illness.