B0977
Title: Inspecting gradual and abrupt changes in emotion dynamics with the time-varying change point autoregressive model
Authors: Laura Bringmann - University of Groningen (Netherlands) [presenting]
Casper Albers - University of Groningen (Netherlands)
Abstract: Recent studies have shown that emotion dynamics such as inertia (i.e., autocorrelation) can change over time. Importantly, current methods can only detect either gradual or abrupt changes in inertia. This means that researchers have to choose a priori whether they expect the change in inertia to be gradual or abrupt. This will leave researchers in the dark regarding when and how the change in inertia occurred. Therefore, a new model is used: the time-varying change point autoregressive (TVCP-AR) model. The TVCP-AR model can detect both gradual and abrupt changes in emotion dynamics. More specifically, this shows that the inertia of positive affect and negative affect measured in one individual differ qualitatively in how they change over time. Whereas the inertia of positive affect increased only gradually over time, negative affect changed both in a gradual and abrupt fashion over time. This illustrates the necessity of being able to model both gradual and abrupt changes in order to detect meaningful quantitative and qualitative differences in temporal emotion dynamics.
