Wise reasoning benefits from emodiversity, irrespective of emotional intensity.

Abstract

The role of emotions in wise reasoning is not well understood. On the one hand, work on emotional regulation suggests downregulating intense emotions may lead to wiser reasoning. On the other hand, emerging work suggests recognizing and balancing emotions provides critical insights into life experiences, suggesting an alternative path to wiser reasoning. We present a series of observational, diary, and experimental studies (N = 3,678) addressing these possibilities, examining how wisdom-related characteristics of reasoning-epistemic humility, recognition of a world in flux/change, self-transcendence, recognition of diverse perspectives on an issue, search for integration of diverse perspectives/compromise-relate to emotional intensity and to emodiversity (i.e., emotional richness and evenness) in a given situation. Across five studiestesting wisdom nominees and examining individual differences and manipulated wise reasoning, it appeared in conjunction with emodiversity, independent of downregulated emotional intensity. The positive association between emodiversity and wisdom-related characteristics occurred consistently for daily challenges, unresolved interpersonal conflicts, as well as political conflicts. The relationship between emotional intensity and wisdom-related characteristics was less systematic, with some studies suggesting a positive (rather than negative) association between emotional intensity and wisdom. Together, these results demonstrate that wise reasoning does not necessarily require uniform emotional downregulation. Instead, wise reasoning can also benefit from a rich and balanced emotional life.

A network analytic approach to measuring emotional granularity

“…As such, the present findings are in line with prior work on emotional and affective complexity (e.g., Carstensen et al, 2000;Tobacyk, 1980), especially that which has established a strong relationship between valence-focused or bipolar affect, lower emotional granularity (Barrett, 1998(Barrett, , 2004Feldman, 1995), and coping and health (Zautra et al, 2000(Zautra et al, , 2001(Zautra et al, , 2005. Similarly, these findings echo work on the diversity of emotional experience, or 'emodiversity' (Quoidbach et al, 2014), which has been linked to positive mental and physical health outcomes (Grossmann et al, 2019;Ong et al, 2018;Quoidbach et al, 2014;Werner-Seidler et al, 2018). Emodiversity is conceptually based on the Shannon (1948) diversity index, H (although see Benson et al, 2018;Brown & Coyne, 2017), which also forms the basis for the positive and negative diversity coefficients computed in the present study .…”

Evidence-Based Training of Wisdom in Business and Management: Use of Scientific Insights About Malleability of Practical Wisdom for Rigorous Interventions

“…Being a wise person in general (i.e., average cross-diary scores) had limited power in predicting emotions or forgiveness in conflicts above and beyond that person's expression of wisdom in a concrete situation. Additionally, re-analysis of the diary data also revealed that on some of the wisdom-related characteristics, the situation rather than trait scores were related to emotionally rich and balanced representation of the situation (Grossmann et al 2019;Study 2). Figure 3 summarizes observational and experimental evidence about variability in practical wisdom.…”

“…Some of the recent work appears to suggest that cultural differences in essentialism of the self extend to wisdom as well. Grossmann et al (2019) surveyed participants from the USA, Canada, China, and Russia and found that people from more individualistic cultures (Canada/ the USA) held more fixed beliefs about wisdom than people from more collectivistic cultures (China/Russia) (see Fig. 1).…”

“…However, such factors can manifest themselves differently between persons and cultures (Ardelt 2004;Baehr 2012;Baltes and Kunzmann 2004;Fischer 2015;Grossmann and Kross 2010). In particular, emotion regulation can be viewed either through the lens of reappraisal of a situation (which in turn depends on perspectivetaking) or suppression of emotional experiences (Gross 2015), but also through a view of emotions in a singular or rich and complex fashion (Grossmann et al 2016b;Grossmann et al 2019;Grossmann and Ellsworth 2017;Kashdan et al 2015). Notably, these features of emotion regulation vary dramatically in prevalence and function across age cohorts and cultures (Ford et al 2015;Grossmann and Kross 2010).…”

Sustainable Compassion Training: Integrating Meditation Theory With Psychological Science

“…By naming felt qualities, such as love, warmth, acceptance, ease, tenderness, safety, feeling seen, gratitude, inner freedom, openness, peace, feeling at home, joy, restfulness, etc., practitioners begin to cultivate an increasing awareness of, and receptivity to, a full spectrum of their innate capacities of care. The capacity to name a full spectrum of caring qualities is analogous to the concept of emotion granularity in affective science, in which labeling emotions with increasing precision and specificity leads to a richer emotional life characterized by greater well-being, discernment, and flexibility around emotional responding (Barrett et al, 2001;Quoidbach et al, 2014;Kashdan et al, 2015;Grossmann et al, 2019). We hypothesize that increasing granularity for caring qualities should lead to an increasing ease with which to notice, access and draw upon such qualities.…”