People with chronic functional dizziness may feel better in moments when they experience more positive emotion, according to a new pilot study that tracked patients’ symptoms and mood in real time rather than relying on retrospective questionnaires.
The researchers sent survey forms to participants at random times over 10 days, collecting 890 returned surveys that were available for analysis.
The participants were 30 patients with chronic vestibular syndrome aged 20 to 74 years who had functional dizziness symptoms. Of these, 16 had persistent postural-perceptual dizziness, known as PPPD, and 14 had chronic vestibular syndrome, unspecified, or CVS-U. The study was a pilot, so the sample was small and the findings should be interpreted with that limitation in mind.
The researchers examined how positive affect and negative affect related to momentary dizziness severity. Because both the mood and the dizziness rating were captured at the same moment, the design avoids the recall bias that the authors note is a risk when associations between dizziness and psychological factors are evaluated through questionnaires alone.
To analyze the data, the team applied generalized linear mixed models. These models allowed the investigators to separate two kinds of variation: within-person variance, meaning how a given patient’s dizziness changed as their own mood shifted from moment to moment, and between-person variance, meaning differences across patients in average mood and average symptom levels.
The results showed that higher positive affect was significantly associated with lower dizziness severity, while higher negative affect was associated with greater dizziness severity. In other words, in moments when patients reported more positive emotion, they tended to rate their dizziness as less severe, and in moments with more negative emotion they rated it as more severe.
The negative association between positive affect and dizziness severity was consistently stronger in the PPPD group than in the CVS-U group. The study also uncovered a significant interaction between positive and negative affect. Simple slope analyses indicated that the protective effect of positive affect remained significant across all levels of negative affect, though the association was stronger when negative affect was high.
The authors suggest that these findings indicate enhancing positive affect may be beneficial for managing dizziness symptoms in patients with functional dizziness, regardless of the presence of negative affect. Because this was a pilot study with 30 participants, the results are preliminary and would need confirmation in larger samples before any clinical recommendations could be drawn. The study was published as an open access article on 22 August 2026.
Subject of Research: Real-time assessment of associations between positive and negative affect and dizziness severity in patients with chronic vestibular syndrome
Article Title: Ecological momentary assessment of the relation between affect and functional dizziness symptoms: a pilot study
Article References: Hashimoto, K., Takeuchi, T., Tanobe, K., Takeda, N., Koyama, A., & Hashizume, M. (2026). Ecological momentary assessment of the relation between affect and functional dizziness symptoms: a pilot study. BioPsychoSocial Medicine. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13030-026-00370-2
Image Credits: AI Generated
DOI: 10.1186/s13030-026-00370-2
Keywords: dizziness, chronic vestibular syndrome, PPPD, ecological momentary assessment, positive affect, negative affect, pilot study, functional dizziness, mood, generalized linear mixed models, Ecological, momentary
News Source: Glenn Wilkins. (October 28, 2026). Momentary mood tracking links positive affect to lighter dizziness in chronic vestibular patients. Scienmag.
