Validating an indirect measure of clarity of feelings: evidence from laboratory and naturalistic settings

This study analyzed the reliability and validity of an indirect measure of clarity of feelings that is based on response latencies (RTs) of mood ratings. Fifty-two participants completed a laboratory session and an experience-sampling week with 6 measurement occasions per day. Shorter RT of mood ratings measured in the laboratory (but not self-reported dispositional clarity) predicted higher overall mood regulation success during the experience-sampling week. As a new indirect ambulatory measure of clarity, RTs of mood ratings were measured on handheld devices during the experience-sampling week. The new ambulatory RT measure of clarity demonstrated good psychometric properties. Within-occasions reliability (internal consistency) was satisfactory, and between-occasions reliability (consistency of aggregated scores) was high. Ambulatory RT of mood ratings demonstrated moderate to high convergence with RT of mood ratings measured in the laboratory session. Both RT measures were unrelated to self-reported dispositional clarity of feelings. However, momentary RT converged with a self-report measure of momentary clarity on the within-persons level: Participants were faster to rate those mood items that they were more certain about. Evidence for the predictive validity of the new ambulatory RT measure was provided by the finding that on the within-persons level, shorter RT (but not self-reported momentary clarity) predicted higher mood regulation success and better mood at subsequent measurement occasions. The results suggest that RT of mood ratings can be used as a reliable and valid indicator of an individual's clarity of feelings in laboratory and experience-sampling studies.     

Distinguishing voluntary from involuntary attention to emotion

This study explored whether voluntary attention to emotion is distinguishable from involuntary attention to emotion. University students (N = 166) completed self-report questionnaires, designed for this study, intended to measure voluntary and involuntary attention to one’s own emotions. Moreover, participants completed questionnaires measuring other emotional constructs and distress. Finally, participants completed a dot probe task intended to obtain a behavioral measure of voluntary attention to emotion. Affect intensity was positively correlated with both voluntary and involuntary attention to emotion. As expected, dot probe emotional bias scores were associated with self-reported voluntary attention to emotion, but not with involuntary attention to emotion. Voluntary and involuntary attention to emotion were also differentially associated with clarity of emotion, anhedonic depression, and worry. The results of this study suggest it is important to distinguish between voluntary and involuntary attention to one’s own emotions.     

State emotional clarity and attention to emotion: a naturalistic examination of their associations with each other,affect, and context

ABSTRACT

Despite emotional clarity and attention to emotion being dynamic in nature, research has largely focused on their trait forms. We examined the association between state and trait forms of these two constructs, and how they are related to affect intensity and two contextual variables: Social context and significant event occurrence. Seventy-nine adults recruited from the community reported eight times a day for a week on the extent to which they were clear about their emotions, attended to their emotions, levels of affect intensity, the number of people with whom they were interacting, and whether a significant event had occurred. State clarity and attention were positively associated, demonstrating a moderate relation similar to that of their trait forms. Trait and state attention, but not trait and state clarity, were significantly positively associated. Positive and negative affect were quadratically associated with clarity and attention, with the highest levels of affect intensity reported at high levels of clarity and attention. Clarity and attention were positively associated with increasing numbers of people with whom people were interacting. Attention and clarity were elevated when significant events occurred – especially during positive events. We discuss the findings in the context of functional adaptation theories of emotion.     

The effect of emotional clarity and attention to emotion on job satisfaction: A mediating role of emotion regulation among Chinese medical staff

The present study examined the relationships among attention to emotion, emotional clarity, emotion regulation, and job satisfaction, and tested whether the plausible associations between emotional processes (e.g., attention to emotion, emotional clarity) and job satisfaction can be mediated by emotion regulation in a sample of Chinese medical staff. In total, 1,766 medical staff in Guangdong province completed questionnaires including the demographics, the Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire, Emotional Clarity, Attention to Emotion, and the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire. Results showed significant direct effect of emotional clarity, but not attention to emotion on job satisfaction. Cognitive reappraisal significantly mediated the associations between emotional processes (e.g., attention to emotion, emotional clarity) and job satisfaction whereas expressive suppression was not a statistically significant mediator. These results suggest that attention to emotion and emotional clarity contribute to job satisfaction by increasing certain emotion regulation strategies such as reappraisal. Intervention or medical education programs targeting enhancing emotional clarity and reappraisal may be beneficial for increasing job satisfaction of medical staff in China.     

Effects of emotion regulation on concurrent attentional performance

We explored the attentional demands of unpleasant picture viewing and emotion regulation strategies. Participants received instructions to view, reappraise, or suppress their emotional experience to unpleasant and neutral pictures, while performing a concurrent auditory discrimination task, both during and after the picture presentation period. Reaction times (RTs) were slower during unpleasant than neutral pictures, which persisted into the post-picture period. RTs were also slower during reappraisal and suppression than viewing and for earlier than later tones following picture onset. An enduring effect of negative emotion was found in the picture and post picture period for suppression but not reappraisal. Findings suggest that both viewing emotional stimuli and regulating one’s emotions using either reappraisal or suppression draw upon common attentional resources, but with suppression resulting in the distinct cost of maintaining the effects of negative emotion.     

What You are Feeling and Why: Two Distinct Types of Emotional Clarity

Individual difference approaches have typically treated emotional clarity (i.e., one’s understanding of one’s own emotions) as a unitary construct. Based on strong theoretical reasons, in this study we explored two related aspects of emotional clarity in a student sample. The first, type awareness, refers to the extent to which people typically can identify and distinguish the types of emotions they experience. The second, source awareness, refers to the extent to which people typically know the causes of their emotions. We psychometrically distinguished self-report items of source and type awareness. Items measuring type awareness were obtained from traditional measures of the construct, clarity of emotions. As no existing measures assess individual differences in source awareness, we developed a set of items with strong face validity. Our results provide initial evidence that one can measure source and type awareness separately.     

Asymmetric dependencies in perceiving identity and emotion: experiments with morphed faces.

We investigated whether an asymmetric relationship between the perception of identity and emotional expressions in faces (Schweinberger & Soukup, 1998) may be related to differences in the relative processing speed of identity and expression information. Stimulus faces were morphed across identity within a given emotional expression, or were morphed across emotion within a given identity. In Experiment 1, consistent classifications of these images were demonstrated across a wide range of morphing, with only a relatively narrow category boundary. At the same time, classification reaction times (RTs) reflected the increased perceptual difficulty of the morphed images. In Experiment 2, we investigated the effects of variations in the irrelevant dimension on judgments of faces with respect to a relevant dimension, using a Garner-type speeded classification task. RTs for expression classifications were strongly influenced by irrelevant identity information. In contrast, RTs for identity classifications were unaffected by irrelevant expression information, and this held even for stimuli in which identity was more difficult and slower to discriminate than expression. This suggests that differences in processing speed cannot account for the asymmetric relationship between identity and emotion perception. Theoretical accounts proposing independence of identity and emotion perception are discussed in the light of these findings.     

Primary caregiver emotional expressiveness relates to toddler emotion understanding

The present study examined the impact of emotional expressiveness in toddlers’ environments on their emotion understanding. Primary caregivers of 35 toddlers completed two surveys regarding the family’s emotional expressiveness and the primary caregiver’s expressivity. Toddlers participated in the Affective Knowledge Test to measure emotion understanding. Toddler emotion understanding related to primary caregiver expressivity, but not family expressiveness. Further, toddler emotion understanding related to primary caregiver Impulse Strength, but not Negative or Positive Emotionality. This suggests that primary caregivers with more impulsive emotional response tendencies may help their children to identify associations between emotional events and reactions.     

Asymmetric dependencies in perceiving identity and emotion: Experiments with morphed faces

We investigated whether an asymmetric relationship between the perception of identity and emo-tional expressions in faces (Schweinberger & Soukup, 1998) may be related to differences in the rela-tive processing speed of identity and expression information. Stimulus faces were morphed across identity within a given emotional expression, or were morphed across emotion within a given identity. In Experiment 1, consistent classifications of these images were demonstrated across a wide range of morphing, with only a relatively narrow category boundary. At the same time, classification reaction times (RTs) reflected the increased perceptual difficulty of the morphed images. In Experiment 2, we investigated the effects of variations in the irrelevant dimension on judgments of faces with respect to a relevant dimension, using a Garner-type speeded classification task. RTs for expression classifica-tions were strongly influenced by irrelevant identity information. In contrast, RTs for identity classifi-cations were unaffected by irrelevant expression information, and this held even for stimuli in which identity was more difficult and slower to discriminate than expression. This suggests that differences in processing speed cannot account for the asymmetric relationship between identity and emotion per-ception. Theoretical accounts proposing independence of identity and emotion perception are dis-cussed in the light of these findings.     

Differences between multimedia and text-based assessments of emotion management: An exploration with the multimedia emotion management assessment (MEMA)

People process emotional information using visual, vocal, and verbal cues. However, emotion management is typically assessed with text based rather than multimedia stimuli. This study (N?=?427) presents the new multimedia emotion management assessment (MEMA) and compares it to the text-based assessment of emotion management used in the MSCEIT. The text-based and multimedia assessment showed similar levels of cognitive saturation and similar prediction of relevant criteria. Results demonstrate that the MEMA scores have equivalent evidence of validity to the text-based MSCEIT test scores, demonstrating that multimedia assessment of emotion management is viable. Furthermore, our results inform the debate as to whether cognitive saturation in emotional intelligence (EI) measures represents “noise” or “substance”. We find that cognitive ability associations with EI represent substantive variance rather than construct-irrelevant shared variance due to reading comprehension ability required for text-based items.     

The perception of visual emotion: Comparing different measures of awareness

Here, we explore the sensitivity of different awareness scales in revealing conscious reports on visual emotion perception. Participants were exposed to a backward masking task involving fearful faces and asked to rate their conscious awareness in perceiving emotion in facial expression using three different subjective measures: confidence ratings (CRs), with the conventional taxonomy of certainty, the perceptual awareness scale (PAS), through which participants categorize “raw” visual experience, and post-decision wagering (PDW), which involves economic categorization. Our results show that the CR measure was the most exhaustive and the most graded. In contrast, the PAS and PDW measures suggested instead that consciousness of emotional stimuli is dichotomous. Possible explanations of the inconsistency were discussed. Finally, our results also indicate that PDW biases awareness ratings by enhancing first-order accuracy of emotion perception. This effect was possibly a result of higher motivation induced by monetary incentives.     

Emotional intelligence, personality and the decoding of non-verbal expressions of emotion

Previous research has highlighted theoretical and empirical links between measures of both personality and trait emotional intelligence (EI), and the ability to decode facial expressions of emotion. Research has also found that the posed, static characteristics of the photographic stimuli used to explore these links affects the decoding process and differentiates them from the natural expressions they represent. This undermines the ecological validity of established trait-emotion decoding relationships.This study addresses these methodological shortcomings by testing relationships between the reliability of participant ratings of dynamic, spontaneously elicited expressions of emotion with personality and trait EI. Fifty participants completed personality and self-report EI questionnaires, and used a computer-logging program to continuously rate change in emotional intensity expressed in video clips. Each clip was rated twice to obtain an intra-rater reliability score. The results provide limited support for links between both trait EI and personality variables and how reliably we decode natural expressions of emotion. Limitations and future directions are discussed.     

Social sharing of emotion following exposure to a negatively valenced situation

Three experimental studies are reported in which we tested the prediction that negative emotion elicits the social sharing of the emotional experience. In two experiments, participants arrived at the laboratory with a friend and then viewed one of three film excerpts (nonemotional, moderate emotion, or intense emotion) alone. Afterwards, the participants who saw the film had an opportunity to interact with the friend and their conversation was recorded. In both experiments participants who had seen the intense emotion excerpt engaged in significantly more social sharing than did participants in the other two conditions. A third experiment extended the investigation to social sharing in everyday life and replicated the previous results. Nonemotional explanations of the effects observed were also ruled out. Results are discussed in the context of the relation between emotional intensity and amount of social sharing.     

Typical performance measures of emotion regulation and emotion perception and frontal EEG asymmetry in an emotional contagion paradigm

In order to replicate and extend previous observations of validity of the self-reported habitual regulation of one’s affect and the perception of other people’s emotions, prefrontal electroencephalographic (EEG) asymmetry was recorded during and after social-emotional stimulation. After stimulation with other people’s vocal expression of anxiety, individuals with lower scores on emotion regulation did not show recovery of asymmetry changes but even increased changes in the direction that had been adopted during the stimulation. Whether this was to the right or to the left depended on their scores on emotion perception. Participants high on perception showed the expected changes to the right during the anxiety stimulation (indicating increased withdrawal motivation) and to the left during the cheerfulness stimulation (indicating increased approach motivation), whereas individuals low on perception showed the opposite pattern. During the anxiety stimulation, participants low on perception only showed the unexpected change to the left if they were also low on regulation. Individual differences in regulation did not play a role when participants were confronted with other people’s laughter. The findings demonstrate the validity of the self-report measures by using EEG measures, and moreover support the usefulness of differentiated and process-oriented approaches in the field of trait emotional intelligence.     

Development and preliminary validation of a questionnaire assessment of expressed emotion

A questionnaire for management of expressed emotion was constructed. It consisted of two scales, criticism and emotional overinvolvement. The questionnaire and the Camberwell Family Interview were then administered to relatives of schizophrenics and preliminary assessments of scale reliabilities and concurrent validities were done. Both questionnaire scales were reliable. With respect to validity the criticism scale correctly classified 88% of the subjects relative to the criticism scale of the interview. The emotional overinvolvement scale was less satisfactory (67%) but still assisted in classification of over-all expressed emotion. Expressed emotion, classification by the questionnaire, correctly identified 84% of the subjects with respect to the interview.     

Knowing what you're feeling and knowing what to do about it: Mapping the relation between emotion differentiation and emotion regulation

Individuals differ considerably in their emotion experience. Some experience emotions in a highly differentiated manner, clearly distinguishing among a variety of negative and positive discrete emotions. Others experience emotions in a relatively undifferentiated manner, treating a range of like-valence terms as interchangeable. Drawing on self-regulation theory, we hypothesised that individuals with highly differentiated emotion experience should be better able to regulate emotions than individuals with poorly differentiated emotion experience. In particular, we hypothesised that emotion differentiation and emotion regulation would be positively related in the context of intense negative emotions, where the press for emotion regulation is generally greatest. To test this hypothesis, participants' negative and positive emotion differentiation was assessed using a 14-day diary protocol. Participants' regulation of negative and positive emotions was assessed using laboratory measures. As predicted, negative emotion differentiation was positively related to the frequency of negative emotion regulation, particularly at higher levels of emotional intensity.     

Attentional control capacity for emotion: An individual-difference measure of internal controlled attention

The purpose of this study was to develop an individual-difference measure of the ability to apply internal controlled attention to emotional mental representations and investigate this measure's relationship to emotion regulation. Attentional control capacity for emotion (ACCE) was measured by adapting a task-switching paradigm where participants had to shift between emotional and neutral task sets. Undergraduate students (N = 91) were randomly assigned to perform either a task measuring ACCE or an emotionally neutral switching task to determine the discriminant validity of ACCE. ACCE predicted behaviour during a stressful anagram task. Individuals who were more efficient at an emotional to neutral task switch persisted longer on the stressful task. In contrast, individuals who more efficient at a neutral to emotional task switch persisted for a shorter time on the stressful task. These results provide insight into the role of attentional deployment in emotion regulation and clinical theories of rumination and anxiety.     

What response times tell of children's behavior on the balance scale task

Analysis of accuracy of responses to balance scale problems gives a global idea of the cognitive processes that underlie problem-solving behavior on this task. We show that response times (RTs) provide additional detailed information about the kind and duration of these processes. We derive predictions about the RTs from Siegler's (1981) model for the balance scale task, including the counterintuitive prediction that young adults are slower than children in solving particular balance scale problems. The predictions were tested in a study in which 191 6- to 22-year-old participants were presented with a computerized balance scale task. RTs were analyzed with regression models. In addition to qualitative differences between items, we also modeled quantitative differences between items in the regression models. Analyses supported the predictions and provided additional knowledge on the rules. Rule II was reformulated as a rule that always involves the encoding, but not always the correct application of the distance cue. RTs provided evidence for the use of a buggy-rule and not an addition-rule. Finally, a relation between rule inconsistency and increased RT was found.     

The emotion reactivity scale: development, evaluation, and relation to self-injurious thoughts and behaviors

Prior research has examined the relations between various facets of emotion and psychopathology, with a great deal of recent work highlighting the importance of emotion regulation strategies. Much less attention has been given to the examination of emotion reactivity. This study reports on the development and evaluation of the Emotion Reactivity Scale (ERS), a 21-item self-report measure of emotion sensitivity, intensity, and persistence, among a sample of 87 adolescents and young adults. Factor analysis revealed a single factor of emotion reactivity best characterized the data. The ERS showed strong internal consistency (alpha=.94), convergent and divergent validity via relations with behavioral inhibition/activation and temperament, and criterion-related validity as measured by associations with specific types of psychopathology and self-injurious thoughts and behaviors (SITB). Moreover, emotion reactivity statistically mediated the relation between psychopathology and SITB. These findings provide preliminary support for the ERS and suggest that increased emotion reactivity may help explain the association between psychopathology and SITB.