A new study finds that individuals will react differently to positive and negative events and will experience varying degrees of “emotional hangover” from those events depending on their personalities.

Researchers from Rice University were looking into the daily affect patterns of 65 workers at an IT company to see how intrinsic task motivation impacted job performance when Hurricane Ike hit the area. Once work and some semblance of normality reconvened, the researchers were able to add to add this negative, random event to their research.

On top of rating the participants’ intrinsic task motivation and compiling how they were feeling, researchers also took into consideration each participant’s “affect spin.” The affect spin is the daily change of emotion in person. The higher the individual’s affect spin, the more range of emotions that person will feel in a given day.

And, according to Occupational Digest, the emotional hangovers felt by persons with a higher affect spin post-Ike were worse than those experienced by individuals with lower affect spins:

“After Hurricane Ike, everyone experienced lower levels of positive affect. This began to recover as the event receded into the past, but not for those with high affect spin, who seemed to be suffering a longer hangover again, but this time with negative consequences. Individual differences in emotional state matter, and this study reminds us that we don’t just differ on average, but also in how dynamically our mood responds to events.”