Affect variability and physical health: The moderating role of mean affect

Abstract

AbstractResearch has only begun to explore how affect variability relates to physical health and has typically not assessed long‐term associations nor considered the moderating role of mean affect. Therefore, we used data from the Midlife in the United States Study waves 2 (N = 1512) and 3 (N = 1499) to test how affect variability predicted concurrent and long‐term physical health while also testing the moderating role of mean affect. Results indicated that greater negative affect variability was associated concurrently with a greater number of chronic conditions (p = .03) and longitudinally with worse self‐rated physical health (p < .01). Greater positive affect variability was associated concurrently with more chronic conditions (p < .01) and medications (p < .01) and longitudinally with worse self‐rated physical health (p = .04). Further, mean negative affect played a moderating role such that at lower levels of mean negative affect, as affect variability increased, so did the number of concurrent chronic conditions (p < .01) and medications (p = .03) and the likelihood of reporting worse long‐term self‐rated physical health (p < .01). Thus, the role of mean affect should be considered when testing short‐ and long‐term associations between affect variability and physical health.