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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Psychol.
Sec. Personality and Social Psychology
Volume 15 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1344350
This article is part of the Research Topic Emotion Dynamics: Mapping the structure and function of emotional variability View all 4 articles

The Relative Importance of Affect Variability and Mean Levels of Affect in Predicting Complex Task Performance

Provisionally accepted
Maddison N. North Maddison N. North 1*Jonathan Huck Jonathan Huck 2Eric A. Day Eric A. Day 1Ashley G. Jorgensen Ashley G. Jorgensen 3Kelsey A. Richels Kelsey A. Richels 4
  • 1 University of Oklahoma, Norman, United States
  • 2 Western Governors University, Salt Lake City, Utah, United States
  • 3 Human Resources Research Organization, Alexandria, Virginia, United States
  • 4 Other, Denver, United States

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Although research indicates affect variability—the extent to which an individual’s emotions fluctuate—is associated with behavioral outcomes related to adjustment and adaptability, it is unclear to what extent findings make important contributions to the literature when past research has failed to account for the role of mean levels of emotion. Accordingly, we conducted a repeated-measures laboratory study of college students learning to perform a complex computer task to examine the relative importance of affect variability indices (i.e., spin, pulse, and flux) compared to mean levels in explaining variance in off-task attention and task performance before and after changes in task demands (i.e., skill acquisition and adaptation). In doing so, we also disentangled valence and arousal (i.e., activating versus deactivating) aspects of emotion. Relative importance analyses showed mean levels of emotion were the most dominant predictors (i.e., explained the most variance)—negative deactivating emotions for off-task attention and positive activating emotions for performance. However, flux in negative activating and negative deactivating emotions also explained enough variance to be considered important, suggesting that flux has been overlooked in empirical research.

    Keywords: affect variability, Relative importance, complex task performance, Adaptability, Off-task attention

    Received: 25 Nov 2023; Accepted: 08 Aug 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 North, Huck, Day, Jorgensen and Richels. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Maddison N. North, University of Oklahoma, Norman, United States

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