Differentiating emotions across contexts: Comparing adults with and without social anxiety disorder using random, social interaction, and daily experience sampling.

Abstract

The ability to recognize and label emotional experiences has been associated with well-being and adaptive functioning. This skill is particularly important in social situations, as emotions provide information about the state of relationships and help guide interpersonal decisions, such as whether to disclose personal information. Given the interpersonal difficulties linked to social anxiety disorder (SAD), deficient negative emotion differentiation may contribute to impairment in this population. We hypothesized that people with SAD would exhibit less negative emotion differentiation in daily life, and these differences would translate to impairment in social functioning. We recruited 43 people diagnosed with generalized SAD and 43 healthy adults to describe the emotions they experienced over 14 days. Participants received palmtop computers for responding to random prompts and describing naturalistic social interactions; to complete end-of-day diary entries, they used a secure online website. We calculated intraclass correlation coefficients to capture the degree of differentiation of negative and positive emotions for each context (random moments, face-to-face social interactions, and end-of-day reflections). Compared to healthy controls, the SAD group exhibited less negative (but not positive) emotion differentiation during random prompts, social interactions, and (at trend level) end-of-day assessments. These differences could not be explained by emotion intensity or variability over the 14 days, or to comorbid depression or anxiety disorders. Our findings suggest that people with generalized SAD have deficits in clarifying specific negative emotions felt at a given point of time. These deficits may contribute to difficulties with effective emotion regulation and healthy social relationship functioning.

Predicting Social Anxiety From Global Positioning System Traces of College Students: Feasibility Study

“…To increase the generalizability of findings, researchers have tried to understand mental health through noninvasive and real-time data collected from people’s everyday lives. For example, studies using surveys to repeatedly sample people’s momentary affective experiences over time have found that individuals with high (vs low) social anxiety symptoms report more anger and fewer and less intense positive emotions [4,5]. While studies that administer repeated surveys offer a glimpse of the socioemotional aspects of daily life, regularly prompting individuals to answer questions also raises the issue of participation burden.…”

An experience sampling study examining the potential impact of a mindfulness-based intervention on emotion differentiation.

“…Individuals with clinical disorders associated with affective problems, such as major depressive disorder (Demiralp et al, 2012), social anxiety disorder (Kashdan & Farmer, 2014), and borderline personality disorder (Suvak et al, 2011) show lower levels of negative emotion differentiation compared to healthy individuals. Also in healthy individuals, the level of emotion differentiation is related to traits such as self-esteem and neuroticism (Erbas, Ceulemans, Pe, Koval, & Kuppens, 2014;Kashdan et al, 2014).…”

“…People's emotion differentiation skill helps transforming negative emotions and stressful experiences, and is an essential component of the emotion regulation process. Research shows that individuals who experience their emotions with more granularity are less likely to resort to maladaptive self-regulatory strategies such as excessive alcohol use (Kashdan, Ferssizidis, Collins, & Muraven, 2010), aggression (Pond Jr et al, 2012), self-injurious behavior (Zaki, Coifman, Rafaeli, Berenson, & Downey, 2013), and they show less neural reactivity to rejection (Kashdan et al, 2014). Despite its central role in mental well-being, there is few, if any, research, that has been able to identify factors that may change an individual's level of emotion differentiation.…”

Positive and Negative Affect as Links Between Social Anxiety and Depression: Predicting Concurrent and Prospective Mood Symptoms in Unipolar and Bipolar Mood Disorders

“…For instance, individuals with depression demonstrate poor understanding of their emotions and are less accepting of their emotions than those without depression (Ehring, Tuschen-Caffier, Schnülle, Fischer, & Gross, 2010; Mennin, Holaway, Fresco, Moore, & Heimberg, 2007). Similarly, socially anxious individuals are characterized by difficulty identifying their emotions, describing their emotions, and differentiating between different types of emotion (Kashdan & Farmer, 2014; Mennin et al, 2007; Spokas, Luterek, & Heimberg, 2009; Turk, Heimberg, Luterek, Mennin, & Fresco, 2005). Thus, emotional difficulties may underlie both depression and social anxiety.…”