Real-World Emotional Experience is Associated with Future Internalizing Symptoms

Depression, anxiety, and other internalizing disorders impose a staggering burden on public health. Alterations in emotional experience are central to theory, but prospective-longitudinal studies of real-world affect dynamics are scarce. Leveraging a hierarchical-dimensional approach, we examined associations between momentary emotional experience and broadband and narrow internalizing symptoms in a risk-enriched sample of 234 emerging adults followed for 2.5 years. Bayesian models demonstrated that low tonic levels of positive affect (PA) were uniquely associated with worsening Well-being symptoms, a core feature of depression, social anxiety, and trauma disorders. Baseline differences in tonic negative affect were associated with the severity of future anxious-arousal symptoms, but not with longitudinal change. Variation in reactive affect and exposure to everyday positive and negative events were unrelated to symptom trajectories. These observations highlight the centrality of tonic PA to the development of a key transdiagnostic symptom and set the stage for developing more effective intervention strategies.