Emotional Granularity is Associated with Daily Experiential Diversity

Opening the contextual black box: a case for idiographic experience sampling of context for clinical applications

The experience sampling method (ESM) is increasingly used as a clinical tool in mental health care. Currently, ESM studies pay relatively little attention to assessing contextual factors, such as a person's experience and perception of events, activities, and social interactions. This has been referred to as the 'contextual black box'. However, personalized context information is essential for applications in clinical settings to gain insight in triggering and maintaining factors of psychopathology. Typically, ESM context items are designed for nomothetic research questions, to capture broad factors that are shared across individuals, such as 'unpleasant events'. We provide an overview of such nomothetic items. We argue that these items have limited clinical utility and describe idiographic alternatives to ESM context assessment to obtain more specific and personalized information about individual clients. Specifically, we present three existing idiographic ESM techniques to context assessment with clinical potential. First, we illustrate open-ended ESM items that prompt clients to fill in text, such as a description of a specific unpleasant event they experienced. Second, we describe personalized response options and self-learning items that ask clients to define personally relevant response categories, such as types of events the client finds unpleasant. Third, we describe personalized ESM items that client and clinician select or formulate together for concepts of interest. We discuss the advantages and disadvantages of these idiographic techniques. Additionally, we suggest future directions for clinical research aiming to address the 'contextual black box' and enhance the potential of ESM in mental health care.

The Double-Edged Sword of Social Sharing: Social Sharing Predicts Increased Emotion Differentiation When Rumination Is Low but Decreased Emotion Differentiation When Rumination Is High

Laypeople believe that sharing their emotional experiences with others will improve their understanding of those experiences, but no clear empirical evidence supports this belief. To address this gap, we used data from four daily life studies (N = 659; student and community samples) to explore the association between social sharing and subsequent emotion differentiation, which involves labeling emotions with a high degree of complexity. Contrary to our expectations, we found that social sharing of emotional experiences was linked to greater subsequent emotion differentiation on occasions when people ruminated less than usual about these experiences. In contrast, on occasions when people ruminated more than usual about their experiences, social sharing of these experiences was linked to lower emotion differentiation. These effects held when we controlled for levels of negative emotion. Our findings suggest that putting feelings into words through sharing may only enable emotional precision when that sharing occurs without dwelling or perseverating.

Using Freely Generated Labels Instead of Rating Scales to Assess Emotion in Everyday Life

To measure emotion in daily life, studies often prompt participants to repeatedly rate their feelings on a set of prespecified terms. This approach has yielded key findings in the psychological literature yet may not represent how people typically describe their experiences. We used an alternative approach, in which participants labeled their current emotion with at least one word of their choosing. In an initial study, estimates of label positivity recapitulated momentary valence ratings and were associated with self-reported mental health. The number of unique emotion words used over time was related to the balance and spread of emotions endorsed in an end-of-day rating task, but not to other measures of emotional functioning. A second study tested and replicated a subset of these findings. Considering the variety and richness of participant responses, a free-label approach appears to be a viable as well as compelling means of studying emotion in everyday life.

Beyond Linguistic Relativity, Emotion Concepts Illustrate How Meaning is Contextually and Individually Variable

Kemmerer describes grounded accounts of cognition and, using crosslinguistic diversity across conceptual domains, argues that these accounts entail linguistic relativity. In this comment, I extend Kemmerer's position to the domain of emotion. Emotion concepts exemplify characteristics highlighted by grounded accounts of cognition and differ by culture and language. Recent research further demonstrates considerable situation- and person-specific differences. Based on this evidence, I argue that emotion concepts carry unique implications for variation in meaning and experience, entailing a relativity that is contextual and individual in addition to linguistic. I conclude by considering what such pervasive relativity means for interpersonal understanding.

Multimodal, Idiographic Ambulatory Sensing Will Transform our Understanding of Emotion

Emotions are inherently complex - situated inside the brain while being influenced by conditions inside the body and outside in the world - resulting in substantial variation in experience. Most studies, however, are not designed to sufficiently sample this variation. In this paper, we discuss what could be discovered if emotion were systematically studied within persons 'in the wild', using biologically-triggered experience sampling: a multimodal and deeply idiographic approach to ambulatory sensing that links body and mind across contexts and over time. We outline the rationale for this approach, discuss challenges to its implementation and widespread adoption, and set out opportunities for innovation afforded by emerging technologies. Implementing these innovations will enrich method and theory at the frontier of affective science, propelling the contextually situated study of emotion into the future.