Emotions within

The Emotions Within: Improving the Accuracy and Impact of Emotion Measurement in Wellbeing Across the Lifespan [PhD project]

Throughout life, people encounter many positive and negative events. The dynamic way that people emotionally adapt to such events lies at the heart of their well-being.

However, most current emotion measures fail to capture adaptation; they are based on trait-level research describing relations across people and are thus not valid for within-person dynamics. Furthermore, emotion-wellbeing dynamics differ across age-groups, cultural groups, and contexts (e.g., everyday life versus major life-events). To truly understand emotional adaptation within people, different measures are needed.

This project aims to develop ecologically valid, contextually sensitive measures of emotion that can be used in intensive, longitudinal, within-person research such as experience sampling (ESM) and applies these to concrete questions of emotions-wellbeing dynamics across the lifespan and during major life events.

It aims to yield a state-of-the-art emotion model that adequately captures individual and contextual emotion experience and to create guidelines and an item bank for emotion measures for ESM research, tailored to different research contexts and age-groups. Furthermore, we also aim to compare experienced emotions as well as relationship between emotion and well-being across different age groups, cultural groups, and contexts.

Team composition

  • Yasemin Erbas has experience in ESM studies of emotions in everyday life as well as emotion theory.
  • Joran Jongerling is one of the TESC directors, with extensive expertise in the methodology and statistics of intensive longitudinal methods, as well as other statistical models.
  • Seger Breugelmans has expertise in research in emotion, culture, and acculturation and has successfully supervised eight PhD students in recent years.
  • Evgeniya Vedernikova is the PhD student who will be working on the project.

Cross-cutting themes

The Herbert Simon Research Institute for Health, Well-being, and Adaptiveness is a research center devoted to carrying out excellent, state of the art research in order to contribute to healthy and resilient people. We have selected three themes, which involve the collaboration between various Departments  and address actual themes in need of both fundamental and applied research.