Low Emotional Complexity as a Transdiagnostic Risk Factor: Comparing Idiographic Markers of Emotional Complexity to Emotional Granularity as Predictors of Anxiety, Depression, and Personality Pathology

Background Individuals vary widely in emotional complexity (EC), the ways in which they represent and experience emotions. Emotional granularity, the degree to which individuals discriminate between emotions within positive or negative categories in daily experiences, is a widely studied form of EC linked to anxiety, depression, and personality pathology. However, less research has examined idiographic measures that index EC in terms of person-specific components of emotional experience, as well as links to psychopathology. Methods This study examined the relationship between two relatively novel idiographic indexes of EC in relation to granularity and measures of psychopathology. Participants ( N = 177, 54% above moderate levels of anxiety, depression, and/or personality pathology) reported perceptions of their emotional components, a qualitative idiographic index of EC. They also completed a 50-day emotion diary. Results Dynamic factor analyses yielded the number of emotion factors for each person over time, a quantitative idiographic measure of EC. Intraclass correlations on diary data measured emotional granularity. Results suggested that each measure was distinct and explained unique variance in predicting anxiety, depression, and/or personality pathology. Conclusions The results highlight the importance of studying both idiographic and existing nomothetic measures of EC as potential transdiagnostic risk factors for psychopathology.