Environmental and social context are associated with emotional states and their dynamics
Abstract
Emotional states fluctuate with everyday context, but contextual influences can operate at markedly different temporal scales and magnitudes. We examined the longitudinal effects of two naturalistic contextual exposures - daily weather (precipitation and temperature) and the COVID-19 lockdown- on emotional states assessed using ecological momentary assessment (EMA) in a university-based cohort in Barcelona, Spain, comprising up to 25,724 observations from 156 participants. Lockdown analyses were restricted to the subset of participants with observations both during and outside the lockdown period (n=45). Participants completed daily smartphone-based assessments of happiness, anxiety, muscular tension, worry, and avoidance over six months. Within-participant fixed-effects models showed that greater precipitation was associated with lower happiness and higher anxiety, muscular tension, and avoidance, whereas temperature showed no significant associations with any of these outcomes. In contrast, lockdown was associated with a broad shift toward lower happiness and higher negative emotional states and with greater day-to-day variability in happiness, anxiety, muscular tension, and avoidance. These findings illustrate how low-magnitude environmental variation and large-scale social disruption can be detected within the same real-world EMA framework, with the latter affecting both emotional states and short-term dynamics.
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BibTeX
@misc{altschuler2026environmental,
title = {{Environmental and social context are associated with emotional states and their dynamics}},
author = {Florencia Altschuler and Christophe Gauld and Enric Vilajosana and Cecilia González Campo and Pamela Chavarría-Elizondo and Víctor De la Peña-Arteaga and Asier Juaneda-Seguí and Ignacio Martínez-Zalacaín and VIktor Jirsa and Pierpaolo Sorrentino},
howpublished = {PsyArXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.31234/osf.io/u38ad_v1},
url = {https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/u38ad_v1/},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Environmental and social context are associated with emotional states and their dynamics
AU - Florencia Altschuler
AU - Christophe Gauld
AU - Enric Vilajosana
AU - Cecilia González Campo
AU - Pamela Chavarría-Elizondo
AU - Víctor De la Peña-Arteaga
AU - Asier Juaneda-Seguí
AU - Ignacio Martínez-Zalacaín
AU - VIktor Jirsa
AU - Pierpaolo Sorrentino
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/23
PB - PsyArXiv
DO - 10.31234/osf.io/u38ad_v1
UR - https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/u38ad_v1/
AB - Emotional states fluctuate with everyday context, but contextual influences can operate at markedly different temporal scales and magnitudes. We examined the longitudinal effects of two naturalistic contextual exposures - daily weather (precipitation and temperature) and the COVID-19 lockdown- on emotional states assessed using ecological momentary assessment (EMA) in a university-based cohort in Barcelona, Spain, comprising up to 25,724 observations from 156 participants. Lockdown analyses were restricted to the subset of participants with observations both during and outside the lockdown period (n=45). Participants completed daily smartphone-based assessments of happiness, anxiety, muscular tension, worry, and avoidance over six months. Within-participant fixed-effects models showed that greater precipitation was associated with lower happiness and higher anxiety, muscular tension, and avoidance, whereas temperature showed no significant associations with any of these outcomes. In contrast, lockdown was associated with a broad shift toward lower happiness and higher negative emotional states and with greater day-to-day variability in happiness, anxiety, muscular tension, and avoidance. These findings illustrate how low-magnitude environmental variation and large-scale social disruption can be detected within the same real-world EMA framework, with the latter affecting both emotional states and short-term dynamics.
ER -