Expertise in emotion: A scoping review and unifying framework for individual differences in the mental representation of emotional experience.

Abstract

Expertise refers to outstanding skill or ability in a particular domain. In the domain of emotion, expertise refers to the observation that some people are better at a range of competencies related to understanding and experiencing emotions, and these competencies may help them lead healthier lives. These individual differences are represented by multiple constructs including emotional awareness, emotional clarity, emotional complexity, emotional granularity, and emotional intelligence. These constructs derive from different theoretical perspectives, highlight different competencies, and are operationalized and measured in different ways. The full set of relationships between these constructs has not yet been considered, hindering scientific progress and the translation of findings to aid mental and physical well-being. In this article, we use a scoping review procedure to integrate these constructs within a shared conceptual space. Scoping reviews provide a principled means of synthesizing large and diverse literature in a transparent fashion, enabling the identification of similarities as well as gaps and inconsistencies across constructs. Using domain-general accounts of expertise as a guide, we build a unifying framework for expertise in emotion and apply this to constructs that describe how people understand and experience their own emotions. Our approach offers opportunities to identify potential mechanisms of expertise in emotion, encouraging future research on those mechanisms and on educational or clinical interventions.

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.…”

Negative emotion differentiation in trauma-exposed community members: Associations with posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms in daily life.

“…Emotional Expertise in PTSD: From Alexithymia to NED Several existing self-report measures quantify aspects of emotional expertise. Each construct is purported to capture distinct but interrelated features of one's emotional experience (Hoemann, Nielson, et al, 2021). One of the most well-studied problems in PTSD is alexithymia, a higher-order construct capturing difficulty identifying, describing, and attending to emotional information (Bagby et al, 1994).…”

Fluency generating emotion words correlates with verbal measures but not emotion regulation, alexithymia, or depressive symptoms

“…Effective emotion regulation encompasses a broad range of emotion-related skills and competencies that aid in monitoring and modifying one's emotions (Gross, 1999;Hoemann et al, 2021;Thompson, 1994). Researchers have investigated many of these components, but one relevant skill that has received little attention is "emotion fluency," or the ability to rapidly bring to mind emotion words.…”