In every language, many words can be used to describe how someone feels at a certain moment. Yet not everyone makes use of this rich emotion vocabulary in everyday life when talking about his or her feelings. Whereas some individuals tend to use specific and discrete emotion terms (e.g., "sad" or "frustrated") to describe an emotional experience, others tend to use broader terms (e.g., "bad" or "negative") that mainly communicate displeasure or pleasure. These individual differences have been called emotion differentiation (ED; Feldman Barrett, Gross, Christensen, & Benvenuto, 2001) or emotional granularity (e.g., Tugade, Fredrickson, & Feldman Barrett, 2004). According to these theoretical approaches, individuals with high ED are able to generate a distinctive, granular, and precise representation of their emotional experience, whereas individuals with low ED use terms that are located along a single dimension of pleasantness-unpleasantness (Feldman Barrett, 1998; Feldman Barrett et al., 2001). In the present article, we aim to present a novel method for assessing ED that more closely reflects this definition of the construct than other measures that have been previously proposed. Before we discuss how ED can be measured and present the rationale behind our novel method, we summarize theoretical considerations about ED's role in the emotion-regulation process and its relation to subjective well-being. These theoretical considerations will be relevant for deducting hypotheses on the predictive validity of methods assessing ED. The Functionality of Emotion Differentiation for Emotion Regulation and Well-Being As Kashdan, Feldman Barrett, and McKnight (2015) have argued, the use of specific, differentiated emotion words conveys important information about an emotion-eliciting event. According to this information, individuals who label their emotional experiences with specific terms can regulate their intense negative emotions more effectively, are better able to pursue personal strivings, and finally, are able to achieve greater well-being. These assumptions are in line with the feelings-as-information theory (Schwarz, 1990), which posits that people use emotions as a source of information about themselves or about their environment and 839138A SMXXX10.

Considering the very large number of studies that have applied ambulatory assessment (AA) in the last decade across diverse fields of research, knowledge about the effects that these design choices have on participants’ perceived burden, data quantity (i.e., compliance with the AA protocol), and data quality (e.g., within-person relationships between time-varying variables) is surprisingly restricted. The aim of the current research was to experimentally manipulate aspects of an AA study’s assessment intensity—sampling frequency (Study 1) and questionnaire length (Study 2)—and to investigate their impact on perceived burden, compliance, within-person variability, and within-person relationships between time-varying variables. In Study 1, students (n = 313) received either 3 or 9 questionnaires per day for the first 7 days of the study. In Study 2, students (n = 282) received either a 33- or 82-item questionnaire three times a day for 14 days. Within-person variability and within-person relationships were investigated with respect to momentary pleasant-unpleasant mood and state extraversion. The results of Study 1 showed that a higher sampling frequency increased perceived burden but did not affect the other aspects we investigated. In Study 2, longer questionnaire length did not affect perceived burden or compliance but yielded a smaller degree of within-person variability in momentary mood (but not in state extraversion) and a smaller within-person relationship between state extraversion and mood. Differences between Studies 1 and 2 with respect to the type of manipulation of assessment intensity are discussed.

Work fatigue represents an essential construct for understanding employee health and safety. In this study, we developed and explored the psychometric properties of a German version of the Three-Dimensional Work Fatigue Inventory and examined a set of hypothesized correlates of work fatigue. Data came from a sample of 439 German workers. Consistent with the original measure, confirmatory factor analyses supported a three-factor solution (physical, mental, and emotional work fatigue), and estimates of internal consistency reliability exceeded .90 for each dimension of work fatigue. The measure demonstrated a meaningful pattern of associations with predictors (time pressure, job control, psychological detachment, relaxation, and trait negative and positive affect) and an important outcome (work engagement). The German Three-Dimensional Work Fatigue Inventory will encourage research on an essential construct for employee health and safety using broader populations of workers.

Ambulatory assessment (AA) studies are becoming more and more popular. However, it can be challenging to motivate participants to comply with study protocols. The aim of the present study was to investigate possible predictors of compliance in AA studies with diverse samples and study designs. To do so, we extracted compliance information, study characteristics, and sample characteristics from 488 previously published studies. The average compliance across the studies was rather high. The total number of measurement occasions and the number of study days were negatively related to the compliance rate. Moreover, a higher percentage of healthy controls in clinical studies was associated with a higher compliance rate. By contrast, other study characteristics (e.g., the amount of financial compensation) and sample characteristics (clinical vs. healthy sample) were not related to compliance. The findings have implications for the design of future AA studies.

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