Individual Differences in Emotional Experience

Individual differences in emotional experience often refer to patterns in one's emotions throughout their daily lives. The three main individual differences the lab currently focuses on are emotional granularity, emotional complexity, and emodiversity. Emotional granularity refers to the specificity with which one experiences their emotions. Someone lower on emotional granularity may refer to their emotional experience as "good" or "bad", whereas someone higher on emotional granularity may use more specific terms such as "frustrated", or "elated". Emotional complexity refers to the number of groupings of emotions that tend to vary together for an individual. Someone lower on emotional complexity may experience all negative emotions simultaneously and all positive emotions simultaneously (resulting in only two groupings), where as someone higher on emotional complexity may experience "anger" and "sadness" together, "boredom" and "nervousness" together, "happiness" and "excitement" together, ect. (resulting in many different groupings). Emodiversity refers to the range and evenness with which one experiences their emotions. Someone lower on emodiversity may experience only a few emotions, or experience one emotion much more often than any other, whereas someone higher on emodiversity would experience the full range of emotions with relative evenness.

Through multiple studies, I have helped to examine how individual differences in emotional experience are related to a variety of psychological phenomena, including mental health symptom severity, social context, and emotional verbal fluency. Please see publications for more details.

Here, I aided in both the design and implementation of ecological momentary assessment (experience sampling) designs. I also aided in cleaning and analysis of the data, including creating a pipeline in R to extract participant data and analyze verbal fluency from participant responses. I also aided in the editing of the below publications.