Unemployment is an emotional and negative experience that disrupts not only a person's income, but also their routine, identity and daily social connections. But what happens next, when the job search starts? While there has been considerable research interest in this topic, most of it has focused on a specific moment in time. Yet the job search can extend for weeks and months.

During that period, individuals will experience fluctuations in motivation, job search intensity and mental health, which in itself is affected by and can affect job search. Research by Jing Zhu of HKUST and Connie R. Wanberg, Ruth Kanfer and Zhen Zhang sheds light on the longer-term processes involved and how these interact to help or hinder people in their search for work.

The authors surveyed 177 newly-unemployed people for 20 weeks or until they were re-employed, whichever came first, to determine how their motivation traits (the goals people wish to achieve) and their self-regulatory states (the extent to which they try to modulate their emotions, attention effort and performance) affected their job search and their mental health.

"The unemployment experience is inherently a self-regulatory process," they said. "Individuals must decide on their own how well and how often to search, and they rarely receive feedback about their effectiveness. And myriad issues challenge their psychological well-being, such as low opportunities for control and skill use, shortage of money and loss of a valued social position."

"In this context, emotion regulation is required to manage feelings of discouragement and frustration, fears about financial challenges, and embarrassment about being unemployed. Motivation to persist is needed to sustain job search efforts despite possible distractions at home, multiple rejections or disliking the search process."

Their research found that people with motivation traits that were approach oriented - meaning their goal was to strive for personal growth or to develop competencies - showed higher levels of job search intensity and mental health throughout the unemployment experience. Job search intensity has previously been shown to equate with success in landing work.

However, individuals who were motivated by avoidance - meaning their goals involved such things as avoiding fear, preventing emotional disruption or fulfilling obligations - had lower levels of mental health throughout their unemployment, although their job search intensity was not so affected.

An important factor mediating both the approach and avoidance motivational traits was "motivation control" - the intentional redirection of attention, goal setting and strategies to sustain the job search. Interestingly, this had a bigger impact on job search intensity than self-defeating, negative self-talk, which did not appear to have much effect.

These findings established some of the factors that affect the individual experience of unemployment, but the authors were also interested in how they related to re-employment outcomes.

"Individuals who reported higher initial levels of job search intensity and mental health at the beginning of job loss experienced greater success in obtaining job interviews, and those who maintained high levels of job search intensity across the job search duration had more interviews and found jobs more quickly. This was consistent with previous research results."

"Our findings also indicate, though, that while it is important to sustain job search intensity, the mental health of a person at the start of the job search also plays an important role in search outcomes."

The authors advised job seekers and organizations that support them to find ways to monitor and sustain the job search effort, such as training individuals to use self-regulation strategies that "pump up" their attentional effort on job search activities. "This may be effective in enhancing job search intensity and may also confer some degree of mental health protection by attenuating the negative influence of avoidance-oriented traits on mental health," they said.