Temporal organization of negative affect shapes reciprocal feedback with psychotic-like experiences in daily life

Negative affect and psychotic-like experiences (PLEs) reinforce each other in daily life, but which temporal properties of negative affect differ between individuals with PLEs and controls and shape this coupling is unknown.

201 adults (99 with PLEs, 102 controls) completed 7-day experience sampling. Person-level mean negative affect, variability (SD), lability (RMSSD, MASD), and inertia were compared between groups, adjusting for mean negative affect. In participants with PLEs, lagged multilevel models tested whether these indices moderated reciprocal negative affect-PLEs associations, joint models separated amplitude from temporal dependency, and a continuous-time simulation quantified the moderation expected from persistence alone.

Participants with PLEs showed larger fluctuations of negative affect beyond its higher mean level (adjusted d = 0.63-0.80), whereas their higher inertia depended on mean negative affect. Within participants with PLEs, only inertia moderated the lagged associations: coupling was absent at low and substantial at high inertia. Lability effects reflected its inverse relation to inertia and vanished once inertia was accounted for. Persistence alone accounted for the moderation of the PLEs-to-negative-affect effect and about half of the reverse effect, which operated through carry-over.

Observational design; young, predominantly female, non-clinical sample; inertia estimated from one week with low split-half reliability.

Between persons, PLEs are associated mainly with the amplitude of negative affect fluctuations; within persons, the persistence of negative affect, not its intensity or amplitude, tracks the strength of its coupling with PLEs. Studies of affective dynamics along the psychosis continuum should therefore distinguish amplitude from persistence.