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Díez de Rivera, Carmen, --- European Parliament --- Officials and employees. --- Spain --- Spain --- Politics and government --- Officials and employees.

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The experience of daily minor stressors, also called hassles, is responsible for emotional changes, concretely in the dimensions of negative (NA) and positive affect (PA). A strong dysregulation of NA and PA is usually responsible for the emergence of depressive symptomatology, which can further progress into major depressive disorder, one of the most prevalent, chronic and recurrent mental illnesses. Using regulatory coping strategies can ease the effect of stress on affect and protect the individual from developing symptoms of depression. So far, research has acknowledged how increases in NA due to daily hassles (i.e. NA reactivity) can trigger the onset of depression, while the direct effect of decreases in PA due to daily hassles (i.e. PA reactivity) on depressive symptomatology remains inconclusive. Research in the area of positive psychology is manifesting the need of studying positive emotional responses and coping strategies to better predict and treat depression symptomatology. This study aims to follow these premises. The present study makes use of Experience Sample Methodology (ESM) to study the role of daily hassles in predicting daily PA in subclinical depression symptomatology and the moderating role of positive reappraisal (PRA) coping strategies on PA reactivity, in a sample of general population young adults. Based on previous research, we hypothesized that daily hassles would decrease daily PA and that this reactivity would be more pronounced in individuals with higher subclinical depressive symptoms, evincing the role of PA reactivity in the emergence of depressive symptomatology. We also expected individuals with higher trait PRA to have a lower PA reactivity, proving the protective role of PRA in maintaining adequate levels of daily PA. Providing a significant association between baseline depressive symptoms and PA reactivity, a final hypothesis aimed to test whether this relationship could be influenced by PRA. We anticipated that individuals with higher baseline depressive symptoms would experience a higher PA reactivity if their PRA was low. Data was collected for 8 days making use of ESM, and depressive symptoms and PRA were measured at a trait level with validated questionnaires. Linear multilevel regression was used to analyse the data. Results indicated only a main effect of daily stressors on daily PA in all of our models, with no effect of depressive symptoms or PRA on PA or as moderators of PA reactivity. Implications and general conclusions derived from this study are discussed in the paper. Main limitations include the use of an unrepresentative subclinical sample and the measurement of variable PRA at a trait rather than a state level. Future studies should account for these limitations before drawing any further conclusions. Overall, this study offers new insights in the study of positive emotional reactivity in the context of subclinical depressive symptomatology and possibly stimulates new ideas on the research of PA reactivity.