Daily trajectories of evening recovery experiences and their role for next-day mood

Focusing on the definition of recovery as a process, we examined how the four core recovery experiences (i.e., psychological detachment, relaxation, control, and mastery) develop during the evening. We tested whether the specific developments of recovery experiences are important for next-day favorable mood states-beyond the mean levels of recovery experiences. We collected data from 92 employees who completed daily morning and afternoon surveys over 10 workdays. In the morning surveys, we implemented the day-reconstruction method to assess detailed information about employees' recovery experiences during several episodes of the previous evening. Our final data set included 477 morning surveys with a total of 1,998 episodes and 383 afternoon surveys. Multilevel growth curve analyses showed that, in general, psychological detachment, relaxation, and control follow a positive linear trend and mastery a negative quadratic trend during the evening. Moreover, path analyses showed that the day-level increase of psychological detachment is important for next-day mood. Specifically, we found that after evenings during which employees experienced a higher increase in psychological detachment than they usually did, they had higher favorable mood states in the subsequent afternoon. Further, our results did not support associations between day-level slopes of relaxation, control, and mastery as well as next-day mood. Hence, our study demonstrates that recovery experiences systematically change during an evening and that this change is partially relevant for next-afternoon mood. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).