The Nonlinear Development of Emotion Differentiation: Granular Emotional Experience Is Low in Adolescence

Abstract

People differ in how specifically they separate affective experiences into different emotion types-a skill called emotion differentiation or emotional granularity. Although increased emotion differentiation has been associated with positive mental health outcomes, little is known about its development. Participants ( N = 143) between the ages of 5 and 25 years completed a laboratory measure of negative emotion differentiation in which they rated how much a series of aversive images made them feel angry, disgusted, sad, scared, and upset. Emotion-differentiation scores were computed using intraclass correlations. Emotion differentiation followed a nonlinear developmental trajectory: It fell from childhood to adolescence and rose from adolescence to adulthood. Mediation analyses suggested that an increased tendency to report feeling emotions one at a time explained elevated emotion differentiation in childhood. Importantly, two other mediators (intensity of emotional experiences and scale use) did not explain this developmental trend. Hence, low emotion differentiation in adolescence may arise because adolescents have little experience conceptualizing co-occurring emotions.

The Role of Affective Control in Emotion Regulation during Adolescence

“…Improvements are observed across all three stages of the emotion regulation process, though developmental trajectories are not uniformly linear. For example, emotional differentiation, which is critical to the identification stage, decreases from childhood to adolescence, then improves again throughout adolescence and stabilizes in adulthood (Nook, Sasse, Lambert, McLaughlin, & Somerville, 2018). Increased habitual use (Zimmermann & Iwanski, 2014) and proficient implementation (McRae, of cognitively demanding strategies, such as cognitive reappraisal, appears to increase more linearly from late childhood to adulthood.…”

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

“…This study provides initial evidence that high emotion differentiation may play a moderating role in buffering individuals from the impact of stress. The current study extends this work by focusing on how emotion differentiation (assessed via a laboratory measure; Erbas, Ceulemans, Lee Pe, Koval, & Kuppens, 2014;Nook, Sasse, Lambert, McLaughlin, & Somerville, 2018) buffers adolescents from the development of internalizing problems (i.e., both anxiety and depression) over the course of a year-long intensive longitudinal study. As such, the current study not only seeks to replicate this prior work, it also implements several methodological advances (e.g., collecting intensive sampling over a longer period of time, using a task-based measure of emotion differentiation, and examining broad internalizing problems rather than depression alone) to clarify the protective role of emotion differentiation.…”

“…Emotion differentiation task. At the baseline laboratory session, participants completed a standard laboratory-based emotion differentiation task (Erbas et al, 2014;Nook, Sasse, et al, 2018). Participants viewed 20 negative and 20 positive images from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS; Lang, Bradley, & Cuthbert, 2008) and rated how strongly each induced a set of emotions on a 10-point scale (1 = not at all, 10 = extremely).…”

“…Adolescence is a developmental period characterized by elevated exposure to stressors, heightened emotional reactivity to stress, and elevated risk of the onset of internalizing psychopathology (Kessler et al, 2005;Larson & Ham, 1993;Larson, Moneta, Richards, & Wilson, 2002). Moreover, although conceptual understanding of emotions continues to develop through the adolescent years (Nook, Sasse, Lambert, McLaughlin, & Somerville, 2017;Nook et al, 2020), emotion differentiation actually declines from childhood into adolescence, making adolescence a normatively low period of emotion differentiation (Nook, Sasse, et al, 2018;Starr, Shaw, Li, Santee, & Hershenberg, 2020). As such, adolescence is a period characterized by low emotion differentiation, high exposure to stressors, and increased risk for internalizing psychopathology.…”

Open Science in the Field of Emotional and Behavioral Disorders

“…Vernon-Feagans et al (2018) shared some data files publicly, whereas other data files were restricted to those who were granted access. Nook, Sasse, Lambert, McLaughlin, and Somerville (2018) shared both data (a link to the data on the Open Science Framework is provided) and materials (e.g., power simulations, tables of supplemental statistical analyses, a detailed scoring guide for a vocabulary assessment) with their study of differences in emotional differentiation in children adolescents and young adults. Additionally, outcome data in SCDs, a common research design used in EBD and related fields, is in essence shared because each data point is graphed and can typically be extracted reliably.…”