Depressive symptoms and deficits in stress-reactive negative, positive, and within-emotion-category differentiation: A daily diary study

Exploring Within-Person Variability in Qualitative Negative and Positive Emotional Granularity by Means of Latent Markov Factor Analysis

Emotional granularity (EG) is an individual's ability to describe their emotional experiences in a nuanced and specific way. In this paper, we propose that researchers adopt latent Markov factor analysis (LMFA) to investigate within-person variability in qualitative EG (i.e., variability in distinct granularity patterns between specific emotions across time). LMFA clusters measurement occasions into latent states according to state-specific measurement models. We argue that state-specific measurement models of repeatedly assessed emotion items can provide information about qualitative EG at a given point in time. Applying LMFA to the area of EG for negative and positive emotions separately by using data from an experience sampling study with 11,662 measurement occasions across 139 participants, we found three latent EG states for the negative emotions and three for the positive emotions. Momentary stress significantly predicted transitions between the EG states for both the negative and positive emotions. We further identified two and three latent classes of individuals who differed in state trajectories for negative and positive emotions, respectively. Neuroticism and dispositional mood regulation predicted latent class membership for negative (but not for positive) emotions. We conclude that LMFA may enrich EG research by enabling more fine-grained insights into variability in qualitative EG patterns.

Subscales of alexithymia show unique pathways through reappraisal and suppression to anxiety, depression and stress

The goal of this work was to explore associations of constituent factors of alexithymia on mental health and potential mediating effects of emotion regulation strategies, specifically suppression and reappraisal. Data were collected through the crowd-sourcing platform Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTURK). Three hundred seventy-seven individuals completed questionnaires related to distress (Depression Anxiety Stress Scales [DASS]), emotion regulation (Emotion Regulation Questionnaire [ERQ]) and Alexithymia (Bermond-Vorst Alexithymia Questionnaire [BVAQ]). Three mediation models were constructed for depression, anxiety and stress, with BVAQ subscales (verbalizing, identifying, emotionalizing, fantasizing, and analyzing) as predictors and ERQ subscales (suppression and reappraisal) as mediators. Results indicated 37.3 % variance in depression, 25.2 % variance in anxiety, and 35.3 % variance in stress was explained by each model. Direct associations revealed emotionalizing and fantasizing were negatively associated with depression, anxiety, and stress, while verbalizing was additionally associated with depression, identifying was additionally associated with anxiety, and all four BVAQ subscales were associated with stress. BVAQ subscales demonstrated negative associations with reappraisal and positive associations with suppression that mediated anxiety and depression. However, suppression did not mediate relationships between BVAQ subscales with stress. Findings support the importance of examining multiple factors of alexithymia and associations with emotion regulation strategies and distress.

Higher emotional granularity relates to greater inferior frontal cortex cortical thickness in healthy, older adults

Individuals with high emotional granularity make fine-grained distinctions between their emotional experiences. To have greater emotional granularity, one must acquire rich conceptual knowledge of emotions and use this knowledge in a controlled and nuanced way. In the brain, the neural correlates of emotional granularity are not well understood. While the anterior temporal lobes, angular gyri, and connected systems represent conceptual knowledge of emotions, inhibitory networks with hubs in the inferior frontal cortex (i.e., posterior inferior frontal gyrus, lateral orbitofrontal cortex, and dorsal anterior insula) guide the selection of this knowledge during emotions. We investigated the structural neuroanatomical correlates of emotional granularity in 58 healthy, older adults (ages 62-84 years), who have had a lifetime to accrue and deploy their conceptual knowledge of emotions. Participants reported on their daily experience of 13 emotions for 8 weeks and underwent structural magnetic resonance imaging. We computed intraclass correlation coefficients across daily emotional experience surveys (45 surveys on average per participant) to quantify each participant's overall emotional granularity. Surface-based morphometry analyses revealed higher overall emotional granularity related to greater cortical thickness in inferior frontal cortex (pFWE < 0.05) in bilateral clusters in the lateral orbitofrontal cortex and extending into the left dorsal anterior insula. Overall emotional granularity was not associated with cortical thickness in the anterior temporal lobes or angular gyri. These findings suggest individual differences in emotional granularity relate to variability in the structural neuroanatomy of the inferior frontal cortex, an area that supports the controlled selection of conceptual knowledge during emotional experiences.

The Role of Emotion Differentiation in the Association Between Momentary Affect and Tobacco/Nicotine Craving in Young Adults

INTRODUCTION

Tobacco/nicotine use is commonly initiated during adolescence or young adulthood, which increases the likelihood of continued use into adulthood and related adverse health outcomes. Despite interest in cessation, achieving and maintaining abstinence is difficult among this population. Cravings are often a barrier to abstinence, which have been associated with intensity of affect at the moment level. Emotion differentiation involves the ability to distinguish between discrete emotion states, and previous work suggests it may moderate the effect of momentary affect on craving, which has never been explored among young adults who are smoking or vaping nicotine.

AIMS AND METHODS

In a sample of young adults (N = 37, observations = 2020, ages 18-25, 51% female, and 78% white) interested in quitting smoking or vaping, we used real-time, naturalistic data capture via mobile phones to examine the interaction of momentary affect and trait emotion differentiation on nicotine craving. Participants were prompted with four surveys per day for 35 days and asked to make a 48-h quit attempt on day 7.

RESULTS

Multilevel models showed moments of higher-than-average momentary negative affect (NA; b = 0.39, p < .001), and positive affect (PA; b = 0.26, p = .001) were associated with greater levels of craving. NA emotion differentiation significantly moderated the associations between PA and craving (b = -0.63, p = .031) and NA and craving (b = -0.67, p = .003).

CONCLUSIONS

Findings from this exploratory analysis suggest that for young adults engaging in a nicotine quit attempt, greater ability to differentiate NA weakens the momentary association between intense affect and craving.

IMPLICATIONS

Results of this study show that the ability to differentiate between discrete emotional experiences may protect young adults against nicotine craving during moments of intense affective experience. These preliminary findings suggest that emotion differentiation, a modifiable construct, could be an important treatment target for individuals engaged in treatment for nicotine dependence.

Examining the Role of Emotion Differentiation on Emotion and Cardiovascular Physiological Activity During Acute Stress

Emotion differentiation (ED) - the tendency to experience one's emotions with specificity - is a well-established predictor of adaptive responses to daily life stress. Yet, there is little research testing the role of ED in self-reported and physiological responses to an acute stressor. In the current study, we investigate the effects of negative emotion differentiation (NED) and positive emotion differentiation (PED) on participants' self-reported emotions and cardiac-mediated sympathetic nervous system reactivity (i.e., pre-ejection period) in response to a stressful task. Healthy young adults enrolled in a two-session study. At an initial session, participants completed a modified experience sampling procedure (i.e., the Day Reconstruction Method). At session 2, 195 completed the Trier Social Stress Test while cardiac impedance was acquired throughout. Linear regressions demonstrated that higher NED, but not PED, was associated with experiencing less intense self-reported negative, high arousal emotions (e.g., irritated, panicky) during the stressor (β =  - .15, p < .05) although people with higher NED also exhibited greater sympathetic reactivity (β = .16, p < .05). In exploratory analyses, we tested whether the effect of NED on self-reported stress was mediated by the tendency to make internally focus (or self-focused) attributions about performance on the task but did not find a significant indirect effect (p = .085). These results both complement prior work and provide a more complex picture of the role of NED in adaptive responses to stressful life events, suggesting that people with higher NED may experience their emotions as more manageable regardless of their level of physiological arousal.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42761-023-00189-y.

Emotional Granularity is Associated with Daily Experiential Diversity

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.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42761-023-00185-2.

Negative emotion differentiation and white matter microstructure

BACKGROUND

Deficits in the differentiation of negative emotions - the ability to specifically identify one's negative emotions - are associated with poorer mental health outcomes. However, the processes that lead to individual differences in negative emotion differentiation are not well understood, hampering our understanding of why this process is related to poor mental health outcomes. Given that disruptions in some affective processes are associated with white matter microstructure, identifying the circuitry associated with different affective processes can inform our understanding of how disturbances in these networks may lead to psychopathology. Thus, examination of how white matter microstructure relates to individual differences in negative emotion differentiation (NED) may provide insights into (i) its component processes and (ii) its relationship to brain structure.

METHOD

The relationship between white matter microstructure and NED was examined.

RESULTS

NED was related to white matter microstructure in right anterior thalamic radiation and inferior fronto-occipital fasciculus and left peri-genual cingulum.

LIMITATIONS

Although participants self-reported psychiatric diagnoses and previous psychological treatment, psychopathology was not directly targeted, and thus, the extent to which microstructure related to NED could be examined in relation to maladaptive outcomes is limited.

CONCLUSIONS

Results indicate that NED is related to white matter microstructure and suggest that pathways subserving processes that facilitate memory, semantics, and affective experience are important for NED. Our findings provide insights into the mechanisms by which individual differences in NED arise, suggesting intervention targets that may disrupt the relationship between poor differentiation and psychopathology.

Sad, Sadder, Saddest: Recognition of Sad and Happy Emotional Intensity, Adverse Childhood Experiences and Depressive Symptoms in Preschoolers

Adverse childhood experiences (ACES) have repeatedly been associated with depression. The ability to differentiate emotional intensity is a protective factor for psychopathology and in the context of life stressors, poor negative emotion differentiation (ED) is associated with depressive symptoms. However, little is known about whether the ability to recognize negative emotional intensity, a theorized developmental prerequisite of ED, influences the relationship between ACES and depressive symptoms in early childhood. The current study examined the interactive effects of ACES, the ability to recognize emotional intensity and depressive symptoms in 249 preschoolers enriched for depression. Findings demonstrated that when experiencing ACES, sad (not happy) emotion recognition was associated with elevated depressive symptoms. Specifically, when facing multiple ACEs, preschoolers with poor and moderate ability to recognize sad emotional intensity exhibited elevated depressive symptoms. Findings demonstrate that when experiencing elevated ACES, sad emotion recognition may be a protective factor for depression in early childhood.

The Association of Daily Stressors and Daily Emotions to Daily Optimism

Abstract. Daily life events often trigger and co-occur with various emotional reactions, which activate self-regulatory processes. One possible outcome of self-regulatory processes is optimism. Limited research has examined optimism in daily life and potential daily predictors, including stressors, negative emotions, and positive emotions. Emotion differentiation – the ability to identify and label discrete emotional states – has the potential to change the association between daily predictors and optimism. The current study contextualized optimism in the emotion-laden daily life and examined the association of daily stressors and daily negative and positive emotional states to daily optimism and the role of negative and positive emotion regulation on these relationships. The current study adopted a daily diary design and collected self-reported daily responses from a sample of 248 college students over a 7-day study period. The results included concurrent and lagged effects and showed that daily negative affect and positive affect predicted both concurrent daily optimism and the next day’s optimism. Greater negative emotion differentiation predicted higher daily optimism. A better ability to differentiate positive emotions predicted a stronger relation between positive affect and daily optimism. The findings underscored the importance of daily affect and emotion differentiation being important markers for optimism interventions and daily practices.

From Knowledge to Differentiation: Increasing Emotion Knowledge Through an Intervention Increases Negative Emotion Differentiation

Labeling emotions with a high degree of granularity appears to be beneficial for well-being. However, there are individual differences in the level of emotion differentiation, and some individuals do not appear to differentiate much between different emotions. Low differentiation is associated with maladaptive outcomes, therefore such individuals might benefit from interventions that can increase their level of emotion differentiation. To this end, we tested the effects of an emotion knowledge intervention on the level of emotion differentiation. One hundred and twenty participants were assigned to either an experimental or a control condition. Emotion differentiation was assessed with a Scenario Rating Task before and after the intervention, and at follow-up. As predicted, negative emotion differentiation increased significantly after the emotion knowledge intervention, and this increase was not observed in the control group. Positive emotion differentiation also increased slightly; however, it did not reach significance level. This finding suggests that an emotion knowledge intervention might be beneficial for increasing negative emotion differentiation and may have implications for the clinical context.

Alexithymia disrupts emotion regulation processes and is associated with greater negative affect and alcohol problems

OBJECTIVE

Alexithymia is common among people who abuse alcohol, yet the mechanisms by which alexithymia exerts its influence remain unclear. This analysis tested a model whereby the three subscales of the Toronto Alexithymia Scale exert an indirect effect on alcohol problems through difficulties with emotion regulation and psychological distress.

METHOD

Men and women (n = 141) seeking alcohol use disorder (AUD) treatment completed the Toronto Alexithymia Scale, the Difficulties with Emotion Regulation Scale, the Brief Symptom Inventory, the Short Inventory of Problems, and the Alcohol Dependence Scale.

RESULTS

The Difficulty Identifying Feelings subscale of the Toronto Alexithymia Scale was positively associated with alcohol problems through emotion dysregulation and psychological distress. The other two subscales, Difficulty Describing Feelings and Externally oriented Thinking, were not associated with any other variables.

CONCLUSION

People with alexithymia may consume alcohol to help regulate undifferentiated states of emotional arousal. Given the prevalence of alexithymia among people who abuse alcohol, treatment supplements that enhance the identification of emotions are needed.

Emotion Differentiation in Current and Remitted Major Depressive Disorder

People with current major depressive disorder (MDD) experience diminished emotion differentiation. We tested the hypothesis that this emotional disturbance is chronic and also characterizes those whose MDD has remitted. As our main aim, we examined emotion differentiation in conjunction with elevated negative and diminished positive emotional intensity, which are both cardinal symptoms of MDD. As an exploratory aim, we examined the predominant theoretical conceptualization that people low in emotion differentiation use more general state terms (e.g., bad) and fewer emotion terms (e.g., anger) to describe their emotional experience. Participants (assessed via diagnostic interview) included individuals who had current MDD (current depressed; n = 48), individuals whose MDD was in full remission (remitted depressed; n = 80), and healthy controls (n = 87). Participants also completed two self-report measures of depressive symptoms and reported momentary emotion repeatedly for 14 days via experience sampling, from which we computed emotion differentiation (i.e., intraclass correlation coefficient) and emotional intensity (i.e., average of the mean emotion ratings across surveys). Finally, participants described a momentary emotional experience via an open-response format, which was coded for the use of general state and emotion terms. Compared to the healthy control group, the current and remitted depressed groups showed similarly low levels of negative and positive emotion differentiation. These findings suggest that diminished emotion differentiation may be a stable characteristic of depressive disorders and a possible target for future prevention efforts. Diminished negative emotion differentiation was significantly associated with higher depressive symptoms as assessed by only one of the depression measures, though this finding did not hold after adjusting for negative emotional intensity. Finally, participants’ emotion differentiation was not associated with use of general state and emotion terms, and groups did not use general state and emotion terms in ways that were consistent with the predominant theoretical conceptualization of emotion differentiation, suggesting the need for clarification in this research domain.

Psychophysiological dynamics of emotional reactivity: Interindividual reactivity characterization and prediction by a machine learning approach

The fast reaction of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) to an emotional challenge (EC) is the result of a functional coupling between parasympathetic (PNS) and sympathetic (SNS) branches. This coupling can be characterized by measures of cross-correlations between electrodermal activity (EDA) (under the influence of the SNS) and the RR interval (the interval between R peaks) (under the influence of the PNS and the SNS). Significant interindividual variability has previously been reported in SNS-PNS coupling in emotional situations, and the present study aimed to identify interindividual cross-correlation variability in ANS reactivity. We therefore studied EDA and the RR interval in 62 healthy subjects, recorded during a 24-minute EC. A Gaussian Mixture Model was used to cluster tonic EDA-RR cross-correlations during the EC. This identified two clusters that were characterized by significant or non-significant cross-correlations (SCC and NCC clusters, respectively). The SCC cluster reported higher negative emotion after the EC, while the NCC cluster reported higher scores on the Center for Epidemiologic Studies-Depression scale. The latter finding suggests that NCC is a pathological mood pattern with altered negative perception. Furthermore, a machine learning model that included three parameters indexing the functionality of both branches of the ANS, measured at baseline, predicted cluster membership. Our results are a first step in detecting dysfunctional ANS reactivity in general population.

Negative Emotion Differentiation Predicts Psychotherapy Outcome: Preliminary Findings

Emotion differentiation (ED), the extent to which same-valenced emotions are experienced as distinct, is considered a valuable ability in various contexts owing to the essential affect-related information it provides. This information can help individuals understand and regulate their emotional and motivational states. In this study, we sought to examine the extent to which ED can be beneficial in psychotherapy context and specifically for predicting treatment response. Thirty-two prospective patients with mood and anxiety disorders completed four daily assessments of negative and positive emotions for 30 days before receiving cognitive-behavioral treatment. Depression, stress, and anxiety symptoms severity were assessed pre- and post-treatment using self-reports and clinical interviews. We conducted a series of hierarchical regression models in which symptoms change scores were predicted by ED while adjusting for the mean and variability. We found that negative ED was associated with greater self-reported treatment response (except for anxiety) when negative emotional variability (EV) was included in the models. Probing negative ED and EV's interactive effects suggested that negative ED was associated with greater treatment response (except for anxiety) for individuals with lower EV levels. Results were obtained while controlling for mean negative affect. Our findings suggest that negative ED can benefit psychotherapy patients whose negative emotions are relatively less variable. We discuss the meaning of suppression and interactive effects between affect dynamics and consider possible clinical implications.

Emotional Granularity Increases With Intensive Ambulatory Assessment: Methodological and Individual Factors Influence How Much

Individuals differ in their ability to create instances of emotion that are precise and context-specific. This skill - referred to as emotional granularity or emotion differentiation - is associated with positive mental health outcomes. To date, however, little work has examined whether and how emotional granularity might be increased. Emotional granularity is typically measured using data from experience sampling studies, in which participants are prompted to report on their emotional experiences multiple times per day, across multiple days. This measurement approach allows researchers to examine patterns of responses over time using real-world events. Recent work suggests that experience sampling itself may facilitate increases in emotional granularity in depressed individuals, such that it may serve both empirical and interventional functions. We replicated and extended these findings in healthy adults, using data from an intensive ambulatory assessment study including experience sampling, peripheral physiological monitoring, and end-of-day diaries. We also identified factors that might distinguish individuals who showed larger increases over the course of experience sampling and examined the extent of the impact of these factors. We found that increases in emotional granularity over time were facilitated by methodological factors, such as number of experience sampling prompts responded to per day, as well as individual factors, such as resting respiratory sinus arrhythmia. These results provide support for the use of experience sampling methods to improve emotional granularity, raise questions about the boundary conditions of this effect, and have implications for the conceptualization of emotional granularity and its relationship with emotional health.

High emotion differentiation buffers against internalizing symptoms following exposure to stressful life events in adolescence: An intensive longitudinal study

Exposure to stressful life events is strongly associated with internalizing psychopathology, and identifying factors that reduce vulnerability to stress-related internalizing problems is critical for development of early interventions. Drawing on research from affective science, we tested whether high emotion differentiation-the ability to specifically identify one's feelings-buffers adolescents from developing internalizing symptoms when exposed to stress. Thirty adolescents completed a laboratory measure of emotion differentiation before an intensive year-long longitudinal study in which exposure to stress and internalizing problems were assessed at both the moment-level (n=4,921 experience sampling assessments) and monthly-level (n=355 monthly assessments). High negative and positive emotion differentiation attenuated moment-level coupling between perceived stress and feelings of depression, and high negative emotion differentiation eliminated monthly-level associations between stressful life events and anxiety symptoms. These results suggest that high emotion differentiation buffers adolescents against anxiety and depression in the face of stress, perhaps by facilitating adaptive emotion regulation.

Measuring Negative Emotion Differentiation Via Coded Descriptions of Emotional Experience

Emotion differentiation (ED) has been defined in terms of two abilities: (a) making fine-grained distinctions between emotional experiences, and (b) describing individual emotional experiences with a high degree of nuance and specificity. Research to date has almost exclusively focused on the former, with little attention paid to the latter. The current study sought to address this discrepant focus by testing two novel measures of negative ED (i.e., based on negatively valenced emotions only) via coded open-ended descriptions of individual emotional experiences, both past and present. As part of a larger study, 307 participants completed written descriptions of two negative emotional experiences, as well as a measure of emotion regulation difficulties and indices of psychopathological symptom severity. Negative ED ability, as measured via consistency between emotional experiences, was found to be unrelated to negative ED ability exhibited via coding of language within experiences. Within-experience negative ED may offer an incrementally adaptive function to that of ED between emotional experiences. Implications for ED theory are discussed.

Investigating the relationship between emotional granularity and cardiorespiratory physiological activity in daily life

Emotional granularity describes the ability to create emotional experiences that are precise and context-specific. Despite growing evidence of a link between emotional granularity and mental health, the physiological correlates of granularity have been under-investigated. This study explored the relationship between granularity and cardiorespiratory physiological activity in everyday life, with particular reference to the role of respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), an estimate of vagal influence on the heart often associated with positive mental and physical health outcomes. Participants completed a physiologically triggered experience-sampling protocol including ambulatory recording of electrocardiogram, impedance cardiogram, movement, and posture. At each prompt, participants generated emotion labels to describe their current experience. In an end-of-day survey, participants elaborated on each prompt by rating the intensity of their experience on a standard set of emotion adjectives. Consistent with our hypotheses, individuals with higher granularity exhibited a larger number of distinct patterns of physiological activity during seated rest, and more situationally precise patterns of activity during emotional events: granularity was positively correlated with the number of clusters of cardiorespiratory physiological activity discovered in seated rest data, as well as with the performance of classifiers trained on event-related changes in physiological activity. Granularity was also positively associated with RSA during seated rest periods, although this relationship did not reach significance in this sample. These findings are consistent with constructionist accounts of emotion that propose concepts as a key mechanism underlying individual differences in emotional experience, physiological regulation, and physical health.

Momentary Emotion Differentiation: The Derivation and Validation of an index to Study Within-Person Fluctuations in Emotion Differentiation

Emotion differentiation refers to the tendency to label emotions in a granular way. While differentiation is an important individual difference in the context of psychological well-being, it is unknown how it fluctuates within individuals. Such a within-person measure is important, since it would allow the study of how changes in differentiation predict subsequent levels of other variables of interest. Here, we present a framework to study emotion differentiation at the within-person level by introducing a momentary emotion differentiation index. This index is directly derived from the classical emotion differentiation index, the intraclass correlation. We first give a theoretical derivation of this index. Next, using data from two experience sampling studies, we show how this new momentary index is related to other momentary indicators of well-being, and take the first steps in building its nomological network. A better understanding of within-person fluctuations in emotion differentiation will allow us to identify the causes and consequences of these fluctuations, and search for ways to teach individuals to increase their level of emotion differentiation.

Shame's Associations with Depression and Problem Drinking: An Ecological Momentary Study

INTRODUCTION

Depression and problem drinking are comorbid in emerging adulthood, yet the processes that link them are not well understood. Research has argued that shame has a unique influence on the experience of problematic drinking, but this has rarely been assessed at the state level. Using ecological momentary assessments (EMAs), we assessed whether shame, and not guilt, mediated the association between baseline depression and alcohol use and problems.

METHODS

One hundred and eighty-four emerging adults (M_age= 19.27) completed a 12-day EMA study. Multilevel models were used to test hypotheses.

RESULTS

In a model with alcohol use as the outcome, there were no significant associations between shame or guilt and alcohol use at the within- or between-subjects level. In a model with alcohol problems as the outcome, guilt was positively associated with alcohol problems but only at the daily level. At the between-subjects level and after controlling for guilt, there was a significant association between depression, shame, and alcohol problems; average levels of shame mediated the association between depression and alcohol problems. In post-hoc reverse directionality models, average alcohol problems mediated the relationship between depression and shame and guilt at the between-person level. No mediation was present for alcohol use.

CONCLUSION

After controlling for guilt, shame is an emotion that helps explain risk for alcohol problems among depressed emerging adults, which has implications for targeted interventions. Reciprocal associations between shame, guilt, and alcohol problems emerged highlighting the need for more fulsome assessments of shame and guilt in future EMA research.

Emotional complexity across the life story: Elevated negative emodiversity and diminished positive emodiversity in sufferers of recurrent depression

BACKGROUND

Greater diversity in the experience of negative and positive emotions - emodiversity - is associated with better mental health outcomes in the general population (Quoidbach et al. 2014). However, conceptual accounts of depression suggest this might differ in clinical depression. In this study, the diversity of negative and positive emotion experiences as remembered by a recurrently depressed sample and a never-depressed control group were compared.

METHODS

Emodiversity was assessed using a life structure card sort task which allowed for the assessment of memory for emotional experience over the life course. Depressed (n=34) and non-depressed (n=34) participants completed the card sort task, from which emodiversity metrics were calculated for negative and positive emotion experience.

RESULTS

Depressed individuals showed recollections of enhanced emodiversity across negative emotion but reduced emodiversity across positive emotion, relative to never-depressed individuals.

LIMITATIONS

This study involved a relatively small sample size.

DISCUSSION

This study indicates that greater diversity of negative emotion experience, which has been interpreted as a protective factor against depressed mood in community samples (Quoidbach et al., 2014), instead characterises the remembered experience of recurrent clinical depression. The finding that positive emodiversity is adaptive in depression suggests that therapeutic outcomes may be improved by facilitating exposure to a diverse range of positive emotions. These findings indicate that the relationship between emotion diversity and mental health is more complex than hitherto assumed.