Unraveling the link between neuroticism and well-being in daily life: The role of event occurrence, event appraisals, affective reactivity, and affective recovery.

Recent studies suggest a robust link between neuroticism and daily fluctuations in affective well-being. However, the specific affective processes that underlie this association remain unclear. This study examines four affective processes, event frequency/intensity, event appraisal, affective reactivity, and affective recovery, for both positive and negative events. To address these questions, we synthesized findings from five ambulatory assessment data sets (N = 1,118 participants, N = 96,699 observations). Using meta-analytic path analysis, we found that neuroticism was significantly associated with reporting more frequent and intense negative events, with increased negative affect reactivity to negative events, and with decreased recovery from negative events, which were also significantly associated with mean negative affect. As for positive events, their frequency and intensity were not significantly associated with neuroticism, but participants high in neuroticism responded more strongly to them. Using a sixth data set, we also showed that subjective appraisals of negative events were much more strongly associated with neuroticism and affective well-being than objective event occurrence. However, the operationalizations of these processes pose unique theoretical and empirical challenges that current operationalizations and data sets struggle to address. Thus, our findings provide evidence for the importance of these affective processes for both neuroticism and affective well-being in everyday life, while also highlighting the limitations of current operationalizations of these processes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).