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Feelings change. People’s emotional lives are characterized by ups and downs, changes and fluctuations following the ebb and flow of daily life. Studying the patterns and characteristics of these changes gives researchers insight into the dynamics of emotions and how people regulate their emotions, for better or for worse. In this article, we examine the concept of emotional inertia as a fundamental feature of the dynamics of emotional experience and discuss its relationship to psychological maladjustment. Emotional Variability and Adjustment One of the most common findings in the study of emotion dynamics is that high levels of emotional variability are asso-ciated with maladaptive psychological functioning. For instance, individuals who display larger emotional variability over time (expressed, for instance, as the standard deviation o