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Social contact can lift our mood but later leave us drained. A new study has tracked this full emotional sequence in everyday life. Researchers found that being around others boosts emotional energy at the moment, yet contributes to rising fatigue a few hours later.

By combining smartphone surveys with Bluetooth-based sensing, the team at Karl Landsteiner University of Health Sciences (KL Krems) captured both effects within a shared timeframe. Their results, in iScience, reveal how everyday encounters shape emotional states not just instantly, but across hours.

Understanding how social contact influences emotional well-being is a core concern in psychology, but studying it in real life has long been a challenge. Self-report methods are often cumbersome or unreliable. In this study conducted by the Division of Psychological Methodology at KL Krems, researchers combined experience sampling鈥攂rief smartphone surveys鈥攚ith passive Bluetooth scanning over two weeks.

Eighty adult participants responded four times a day about how they felt, generating more than 3,700 emotional data points. Simultaneously, their phones logged over 123,000 nearby Bluetooth devices, used as a proxy for social presence. The study tracked four mood states鈥攙igor, fatigue, dejection, and anger.

High and low

"Social interactions are typically seen as energizing鈥攁nd our study confirms that this is indeed the case," says Dr. David Willinger, MSc, Scientific Staff (PostDoc) at the Division of Psychological Methodology at KL Krems. "What's striking is how clearly we could trace both the immediate uplift and the delayed fatigue within a single time-resolved framework."

The data showed a consistent pattern: emotional vitality, or vigor, surged when people were around others, while feelings of dejection fell. But three to four hours later, fatigue levels began to rise. "It's like a social sugar high," Willinger explains. "Great at the moment, but with a price down the line."

To explore how social presence affects emotion, the researchers applied three complementary methods. Linear mixed-effects models (which detect patterns across repeated measures within and between individuals) captured both immediate and delayed links between proximity and mood. A continuous-time structural equation model (which estimates how variables influence each other over time, including feedback loops) traced how social contact and negative affect influenced each other over several hours.

Finally, a multi-state model (which identifies shifts between distinct psychological states and how long they persist) showed moves between energized and fatigued states. Taken together, these approaches offered a detailed and reliable picture of emotional dynamics unfolding in everyday life.

While earlier research had documented both mood elevation and delayed fatigue, this study is the first to show both effects unfolding within the same temporal sequence and with high temporal precision. Vigorous emotional states tended to last longer than fatigued ones. Yet a more intense social presence made transitions from vigor to fatigue more likely. The benefits of interaction, in other words, may wear off before the emotional costs are felt. The data also showed that a stronger sense of control over the situation helped participants recover from fatigue and maintain emotional stability.

Time shift

The results refine existing theories such as social baseline theory and social allostasis, which describe the emotional effects of social presence. What this study adds is a clear picture of how these effects shift over time. Emotional responses, the data show, are not static鈥攖hey evolve across hours depending on social intensity and context.

By combining dense real-life data with advanced modeling, researchers at KL Krems have produced a rare, time-based map of how social exposure plays out emotionally in the flow of everyday life. The work highlights the university's growing role in psychologically grounded, real-world research.