The Impact of Temporal Trajectories of Emotional Experience on Blood Donor Return.

Background: Despite recognition that blood donation is an affectively poignant process, many aspects of donors' emotional experiences and their consequences remain unexamined.

Purpose: This study tracked the donor's experience of several positive and negative emotions live as they arose during the donation process and tracked the impact of that experience on donor return.

Methods: New whole blood donors (N = 414) reported their experience of 10 positive and 10 negative discrete emotions before, during, and after donation. Return behavior of these donors and a business-as-usual control group was tracked over the next 6 months.

Results: In total, 46.4% of participants and 43.2% of the control group returned to donate within 6 months. On the basis of established relevance to blood donation and statistical considerations, group-based latent trajectories of three emotions (joy, calm, and stress) were modeled over time, revealing five classes of emotion trajectories. A trajectory of low/increasing joy and calm and high/decreasing stress was associated with significantly lower probability of return (preturn = .28, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 0.20, 0.38) relative to all but one other trajectory group and the control group. A trajectory of medium-high/increasing joy, high calm, and low/decreasing stress was associated with a significantly greater probability of return (preturn = .59, 95% CI = 0.49, 0.69) relative to two other trajectory classes and the control group.

Conclusions: By identifying blood donors' emotion trajectories over time and the impact of those trajectories on return behavior, this research paves the way for the development of effective emotion-focused interventions to boost retention.