Cultivating Emotional Granularity

Abstract

An emerging focus in affective science is the expertise that underlies healthy emotionality. A growing literature highlights emotional granularity – the ability to make fine-grained distinctions in one’s affective feelings – as an important skill. Cross-sectional evidence indicating the benefits of emotional granularity raises the question of how emotional granularity might be intentionally cultivated through training. To address this question, we present shared theoretical features of centuries-old Buddhist philosophy and modern constructionist theory that motivate the hypothesis that contemplative practices may improve granularity. We then examine the specific mindfulness-style practices originating in Buddhist traditions that are hypothesized to bolster granularity. We conclude with future directions to empirically test whether emotional granularity can be intentionally cultivated.

Context reconsidered: Complex signal ensembles, relational meaning, and population thinking in psychological science.

“…In particular, these ideas let us explore whether the phenomena that culturally constitute a particular version of the human mind—with various cognitions, emotions (both their generation and their perception), and the like—emerge from more basic, domain-general causal processes that are shaped by evolution, development, and ecology. These domain-general causal processes might also account for the variety of mental categories that have been observed in other cultures, as well as individual differences in the granularity of categories that constitute a human mind (e.g., Barrett, 2017a; Hoemann, Khan, Feldman, et al, 2021; Hoemann, Nielson, et al, 2021; Kashdan et al, 2015; Wilson-Mendenhall & Dunne, 2021) On the other hand, if we continue to insist, as a field, that reliable and generalizable observations will result from isolating and manipulating a couple of variables and their interactions as long as we tighten our methodological belts and improve our experimental rigor, then we are fooling ourselves.…”

Echoes of the Abhidamma in the Component Process Model of Emotion

“…Thus there is room to consider the two models as comparable, which leads to several other questions on, if not the detailed idiosyncrasies separating the two, the persistent neglect of theories stemming from a mind-focused tradition like Buddhism. Comparing and contrasting di↵erent theories of emotion is a vigorous academic exercise yet old, primarily Eastern analytical theories of the mind are not commonly included in the debate (but see Wilson-Mendenhall & Dunne, 2021). This exclusion points to a collective waste, as it leaves modern Western psychology to reinvent the proverbial wheel instead of improving on it.…”