Abstract

Life events can dramatically affect our psychological state and work performance. Stress, for example, has been linked to professional dissatisfaction, increased anxiety, and workplace burnout. We therefore explore the impact of atypical positive and negative events on a number of psychological constructs through a longitudinal study of hospital and aerospace workers. We use causal analysis to demonstrate that positive life events increase positive affect, while negative events increase stress, anxiety and negative affect. While most events have a transient effect on psychological states, major negative events, like illness or attending a funeral, can reduce positive affect for multiple days. These findings provided motivation for us to train machine learning models that detect whether someone has a positive, negative, or generally atypical event. We show that wearable sensors paired with embedding-based …

Date

January 14, 2026

Authors

Keith Burghardt, Nazgol Tavabi, Emilio Ferrara, Shrikanth Narayanan, Kristina Lerman

Conference

Social, Cultural, and Behavioral Modeling: 14th International Conference, SBP-BRiMS 2021, Virtual Event, July 6–9, 2021, Proceedings 14

Pages

257-267

Publisher

Springer International Publishing