Sadness, sorrow, or despair: Improving existing tasks assessing emotional granularity

Abstract

Some people can effortlessly pinpoint which emotion they are experiencing, for instance easily identifying butterflies in their tummy as excitement rather than nervousness, whilst others confuse their emotions. This ability to make fine-grained distinctions between emotional states – termed emotional granularity – is important for psychological adjustment and mental health. Existing tasks assessing emotional granularity require participants to translate emotional experiences into words and therefore rely heavily on language ability. In this paper, we discuss this limitation (amongst others) and introduce our novel EmoMap paradigm for assessing emotional granularity, which does not require labelling of emotional state.