Daily Stressor-Related Negative Mood and its Associations with Flourishing and Daily Curiosity

Abstract

There are pronounced individual differences in the extent to which affective responses are associated with daily stressor exposure. These individual differences have implications for health and well-being. We use 21 days of daily diary data in 167 participants (mean age = 25.37, SD = 7.34; 81.44% women) and test (1) the moderating effect of flourishing on daily stressor-related negative mood and (2) the moderating effect of daily curiosity on daily stressor-related negative mood. Results indicate that people high in flourishing show lower stressor-related negative mood and that stressor-related negative mood is higher than usual on days of lower than usual curiosity. Together, these findings extend a large body of work indicating associations between stressor-related negative mood and both psychopathology and poor physical health to trait and state markers of well-being.