Abstract
Emotional granularity is the ability to create differentiated and nuanced emotional experiences and is associated with positive health outcomes. Individual differences in granularity are hypothesized to reflect differences in emotion concepts, which are informed by prior experience and impact current and future experience. Greater variation in experience, then, should be related to the rich and diverse emotion concepts that support higher granularity. Using natural language processing methods, we analyzed descriptions of everyday events to estimate the diversity of contexts and activities encountered by participants. Across three studies varying in language (English, Dutch) and modality (written, spoken), we found that participants who referred to a more varied and balanced set of contexts and activities reported more differentiated and nuanced negative emotions. Experiential diversity was not consistently associated with granularity for positive emotions. We discuss the contents of daily life as a potential source and outcome of individual differences in emotion.
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Notes
Emotional granularity can also be estimated using an intraclass correlation (ICC) for agreement with averaged raters (i.e., ‘A-k’ method). There is no apparent consensus in the literature as to which approach is preferred (Thompson et al., 2021) and in general consistency and agreement estimates are highly correlated (rs = .95-.99; Erbas et al., 2014). In the present studies, changing the ICC type did not affect the overall pattern of results.
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The authors are grateful to Drs. Jolie B. Wormwood, Karen S. Quigley, and Lisa Feldman Barrett for providing data for secondary analysis.
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K.H. was supported by the Research Foundation – Flanders (12A3923N) and by a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship from the European Commission (892379) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program. Y.L. was supported by the European Research Council (Advanced Grant 834587 to Dr. Batja Mesquita), also under Horizon 2020. This paper reflects only the authors’ views; the European Commission and European Research Council are not liable for any use that may be made of the contained information. P.K. was supported by the KU Leuven Research Council (C14/19/054, IBOF/21/090). R.L.B. was supported in part by a grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation (196255). Study 1 data collection was supported by the US Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences (W911NF-16-1-0191 to Dr. Jolie B. Wormwood, Dr. Karen S. Quigley). The views, opinions, and/or findings contained in this paper are those of the authors and shall not be construed as an official Department of the Army position, policy, or decision, unless so designated by other documents. Study 2 data collection was supported by a National Institute of Health Director’s Pioneer Award (DP1OD003312 to Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett). Study 3 data collection was supported by the KU Leuven Research Council (C14/19/054, C3/20/005).
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Anonymized data and analytic code are available via a repository hosted by the Center for Open Science (OSF) at https://osf.io/gn8ca/. To protect participant privacy, the raw language data analyzed in the current studies are not publicly available.
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K.H. assisted with data collection for Study 1. M.G. collected the data for Study 2. P.K. oversaw data collection for Study 3. K.H. and Y.L. analyzed the data. K.H. drafted the manuscript. All authors provided revisions and approved the final version of the manuscript.
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These studies were conducted in line with the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki. Approval for Studies 1 and 2 was granted by the Institutional Review Board at Northeastern University (IRB#s 13-03-16, 16-11-32). Approval for Study 3 was granted by the KU Leuven Social and Societal Ethics Committee (protocol G-2018-01-1095).
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Hoemann, K., Lee, Y., Kuppens, P. et al. Emotional Granularity is Associated with Daily Experiential Diversity. Affec Sci 4, 291–306 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42761-023-00185-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42761-023-00185-2