Schedule of Events | Symposia

Dynamic emotional states captured by a novel mobile tool relate to affective disorder symptoms and memory organization

Poster Session D - Monday, March 31, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Mason McClay¹ (masongmcclay@g.ucla.edu), Jiayang Li¹, Matthew Sachs², Christina Sandman¹, David Clewett¹; ¹UCLA, ²Columbia University

The ability to express appropriate emotional reactions in response to one’s environment is hypothesized to be impaired in emotion disorders like depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Further, recent work reveals that fluctuating emotional states help structure episodic memories. However, there are limited tools available for measuring real-time emotion dynamics and their relation to depression, trauma, and memory organization. In this pre-registered study (n=373), we tested if fluctuations in emotional reactions to custom musical pieces relate to symptoms of depression and trauma as well as the semantic structure of autobiographical memories. To capture real-time changes in felt emotional valence and arousal during music listening, we developed a novel mobile phone web-app called the Mobile Emotion Compass. We then measured event segmentation of autobiographical memories by measuring semantic variance within memories using natural language processing. Our results revealed that higher semantic variability, or segmentation, of autobiographical memories was correlated with more normative emotional responding. Further, hidden markov modeling of the valence and arousal time-course data revealed that higher intrusive-thinking symptom severity was related to a higher likelihood of being in high-movement transitory, or “frenetic”, emotional states. Memory segmentation, on the other hand, was related to a higher likelihood of leaving low-movement stationary, or “stickier”, emotional states. These findings suggest that certain PTSD symptoms are related to less stable and less normative emotional responding, while more structured memories relate to more normative emotional responding. They also demonstrate the efficacy of the Mobile Emotion Compass for assessing emotion dynamics in naturalistic contexts.

Topic Area: EMOTION & SOCIAL: Emotional responding