Vanishing Boundaries: A Unifying Account of Multidimensional Emotion Dynamics and Alterations in Depression

Resumen

Emotions are fundamentally integral to shaping the order and disorders in human lives. Yet, a principled, quantitative framework explaining emotional dynamics and their alteration in mental disorders has been elusive. This challenge arises from the complex and multidimensional nature of emotions but also, at least partially, due to a shortage of large longitudinal measurements and the use of generative mathematical models, leading to a spectrum of partially contrasting theories. Our study seeks to overcome these challenges by employing dynamic systems theory, the mathematical study of complex systems. We apply this approach to a dataset containing over 400,000 texts from more than 1,600 individuals, with half reporting a diagnosis of Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), collected from X (previously Twitter). We examined the emotional experiences and significant life events described in these texts across one month, which we extracted using state-of-the-art natural language processing. The key result of our research is the discovery of emotion-specific dynamics – the unique ways in which different emotions maintain their influence over time. In individuals diagnosed with MDD, we observed a ’blunting’ of the inter-emotional dynamics; this is not merely a dulling of emotions, but rather a vanishing of the boundaries between them. Our findings thus challenge and unify traditional views in this area: if viewed in isolation, this blending of emotions could be misinterpreted as augmented negative, blunted positive emotions, and as Emotional Context Insensitivity (ECI). Our study therefore offers a principled mathematical understanding of emotion dynamics and their alterations within mental disorders, potentially leading to more effective therapeutic interventions.

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Cómo citar (APA 7)

Bucur, A. M., Koosha, T. A., Cosma, A., Flek, L., Thanarajah, S. E., Bernhard, F., Rosso, P., & Jamalabadi, H. (2024). Vanishing Boundaries: A Unifying Account of Multidimensional Emotion Dynamics and Alterations in Depression. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/p6923