Knowledge Is Precision: Conceptual Complexity and Positive Emotion Differentiation (2014)

Undergraduate: Caitlin Mason

Faculty Advisor: Kristen Lindquist
Department: Psychology & Neuroscience

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People describe positive and negative emotional states with varying degrees of precision, which is known as emotional granularity (Barrett, Gross, Christensen, & Benvenuto, 2001). Recent research from our lab indicates that people are more granular in describing negative emotions as opposed to positive emotions (Rice & Lindquist, 2013) but the reason for this ¿valence asymmetry in emotional granularity¿ remains unclear. The present study thus examined the mechanisms underlying this asymmetry. We predicted that people with more complex conceptual knowledge about positive emotions would also be more granular for positive emotions compared with those with less conceptual complexity. To measure the complexity of participants¿ concept knowledge, sixty participants (ages 18-22) completed a card sort task (Showers, 1992; Rafaeli-Mor, Gotlib, & Revelle, 1999; Linville, 1985) in which they sorted up to 50 cards each labeled with an emotional attribute into as many emotional categories as they could think of. This task was counterbalanced with a lab-based measure of granularity in which participants viewed an evocative image and rated the extent to which they felt 16 different emotions in 48 trials. We predict that participants who demonstrated greater complexity for positive emotions in the card sort task will show greater granularity for positive emotions in the lab-based measure compared with those participants who exhibited less complexity for positive emotions.