Abstract
People with current major depressive disorder (MDD) experience diminished emotion differentiation. We tested the hypothesis that this emotional disturbance is chronic and also characterizes those whose MDD has remitted. As our main aim, we examined emotion differentiation in conjunction with elevated negative and diminished positive emotional intensity, which are both cardinal symptoms of MDD. As an exploratory aim, we examined the predominant theoretical conceptualization that people low in emotion differentiation use more general state terms (e.g., bad) and fewer emotion terms (e.g., anger) to describe their emotional experience. Participants (assessed via diagnostic interview) included individuals who had current MDD (current depressed; n = 48), individuals whose MDD was in full remission (remitted depressed; n = 80), and healthy controls (n = 87). Participants also completed two self-report measures of depressive symptoms and reported momentary emotion repeatedly for 14 days via experience sampling, from which we computed emotion differentiation (i.e., intraclass correlation coefficient) and emotional intensity (i.e., average of the mean emotion ratings across surveys). Finally, participants described a momentary emotional experience via an open-response format, which was coded for the use of general state and emotion terms. Compared to the healthy control group, the current and remitted depressed groups showed similarly low levels of negative and positive emotion differentiation. These findings suggest that diminished emotion differentiation may be a stable characteristic of depressive disorders and a possible target for future prevention efforts. Diminished negative emotion differentiation was significantly associated with higher depressive symptoms as assessed by only one of the depression measures, though this finding did not hold after adjusting for negative emotional intensity. Finally, participants’ emotion differentiation was not associated with use of general state and emotion terms, and groups did not use general state and emotion terms in ways that were consistent with the predominant theoretical conceptualization of emotion differentiation, suggesting the need for clarification in this research domain.
Highlights
Major depressive disorder (MDD) is among the most prevalent and debilitating mental disorders (Eaton et al, 2012), and the already high prevalence rate is increasing (Weinberger et al, 2018)
The three groups significantly differed in levels of depressive symptoms as assessed by the Mood and Anxiety Symptom Questionnaire (MASQ) anhedonic depression scale, F(2, 210) = 63.87, p < 0.001, which is consistent with previous work (e.g., Figueroa et al, 2018)
We see a similar pattern of depressive symptoms by group for the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D) measure too: The groups significantly differed in CES-D scores, F(2, 210) = 147.0, p < 0.001
Summary
Major depressive disorder (MDD) is among the most prevalent and debilitating mental disorders (Eaton et al, 2012), and the already high prevalence rate is increasing (Weinberger et al, 2018) It is a highly recurrent disorder (Bockting et al, 2015), with more people experiencing recurrent episodes than single episodes (e.g., Andrade et al, 2003). Researchers most commonly measure differentiation using repeated measurements of precise emotion terms and compute a statistic, such as an intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) (Thompson et al, 2021b) In this case, individuals with low differentiation are theorized to use similar terms over time to describe their feeling states, whereas those with high differentiation report varying combinations of emotions over time to describe their feeling states
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