How does depression affect how we tell our feelings apart?
People with both active and recovered depression have a harder time distinguishing between different negative and positive feelings compared to healthy individuals.
Source
Emotion Differentiation in Current and Remitted Major Depressive Disorder
What they did
Researchers evaluated 215 adults, categorizing them into three groups: 48 with active depression, 80 with recovered depression, and 87 healthy controls. Over a 14-day period, participants completed up to 70 brief surveys on their smartphones to track their emotional states. They also completed a single open-ended question describing their current emotional state to see if their actual vocabulary matched their measured ability to differentiate feelings.
What they found
Both currently depressed and recovered individuals showed significantly lower ability to differentiate between negative emotions and between positive emotions compared to healthy controls. While currently depressed participants reported the highest negative emotional intensity, those who were recovered still reported higher negative intensity than the healthy controls. Surprisingly, a person's calculated ability to distinguish emotions did not correlate with whether they used specific emotional terms or vague state descriptions in their open-ended responses.
The limits
What it doesn't show
Because this study analyzed data from a single point in time rather than tracking participants over several years, it cannot prove whether poor emotion differentiation causes depression or is an ongoing scar left behind by previous depressive episodes. The researchers also evaluated the open-ended text response at only one point in time, which may not capture how people typically describe their feelings across varying daily situations. Additionally, the findings rely on a specific list of positive and negative words chosen by the researchers, which might not represent the entire spectrum of human emotional experiences.
Key terms
- Emotion differentiation
- The ability to identify and distinguish between specific, nuanced emotional experiences rather than experiencing feelings as globally good or bad.
- Major depressive disorder
- A mental health condition characterized by persistent low mood, loss of interest in activities, and emotional disturbances.
- Experience sampling
- A research methodology where participants are repeatedly prompted in real-time throughout their daily lives to report on their current thoughts, feelings, or behaviors.
- Intraclass correlation coefficient
- A statistical index used in this context to measure how similarly a participant rates different emotional terms over time, where higher similarity indicates lower differentiation.
- Remitted depression
- A state in which an individual who previously met clinical criteria for depressive episodes no longer meets those criteria and is currently free of an active episode.
- Verbal ability
- An individual's capacity to understand, use, and define words, which researchers measured as a potential confounding factor for describing emotions.
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Quiz yourself
According to the study, what is the primary difference in how individuals with high versus low emotion differentiation describe their feelings?
Common questions
Why does it matter if someone can tell their emotions apart?
Being able to identify exactly what you are feeling (e.g., distinguishing anger from sadness) helps you choose the best coping strategy to regulate that specific emotion.
Does having a larger vocabulary mean you are better at telling your emotions apart?
No, the study found that verbal ability, measured using a vocabulary test, did not significantly relate to a person's calculated emotional differentiation scores.
How do researchers mathematically measure how well a participant tells feelings apart?
They track how closely different emotion ratings track each other over time; if a person always feels sad, angry, and nervous at the exact same times, their differentiation score is low.
Did recovered individuals completely match healthy controls in their emotions?
No, while recovered individuals had healthy levels of positive emotional intensity, they still experienced higher negative emotional intensity and lower emotional differentiation than people who had never been depressed.
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