Abstract
There is debate about whether emotional granularity, the tendency to label emotions in a nuanced and specific manner, is merely a product of labeling abilities, or a systematic difference in the experience of emotion during emotionally evocative events. According to the Conceptual Act Theory of Emotion (CAT) (Barrett, 2006), emotional granularity is due to the latter and is a product of on-going temporal differences in how individuals categorize and thus make meaning of their affective states. To address this question, the present study investigated the effects of individual differences in emotional granularity on electroencephalography-based brain activity during the experience of emotion in response to affective images. Event-related potentials (ERP) and event-related desynchronization and synchronization (ERD/ERS) analysis techniques were used. We found that ERP responses during the very early (60–90 ms), middle (270–300 ms), and later (540–570 ms) moments of stimulus presentation were associated with individuals’ level of granularity. We also observed that highly granular individuals, compared to lowly granular individuals, exhibited relatively stable desynchronization of alpha power (8–12 Hz) and synchronization of gamma power (30–50 Hz) during the 3 s of stimulus presentation. Overall, our results suggest that emotional granularity is related to differences in neural processing throughout emotional experiences and that high granularity could be associated with access to executive control resources and a more habitual processing of affective stimuli, or a kind of “emotional complexity.” Implications for models of emotion are also discussed.
Highlights
Imagine a colleague who, when upset at a slight, reports that he feels angry
The amplitude greatly decreased to a negative amplitude after the late positive peak, resembling Event-related potentials (ERP) waveforms reported in other studies (e.g., Costanzo and McArdle, 2013)
Consistent with our a priori hypotheses, individuals who were high vs. low in granularity showed different neural patterns during the experience of emotions at multiple time frames. This finding is made all the more interesting based on the fact that granularity was assessed as an individual difference based on daily experiences that occurred 2 days before the in-lab assessment of emotion-related ERPs and eventrelated desynchronization and synchronization (ERD/ERS)
Summary
Imagine a colleague who, when upset at a slight, reports that he feels angry. imagine a colleague who when upset at a slight reports that he feels angry, anxious, sad, and disgusted all at once. As predicted by the CAT, individuals who were higher in WMC were more granular in daily life: that is, they were less apt to simultaneously say that they were sad, nervous, angry, and guilty at the same time across multiple sampling instances and instead used emotion adjectives and distinctly at different points throughout the day to describe their experiences Preliminary, these findings suggest that individual differences in participants’ ability to wield conceptual knowledge, as mediated by cognitive abilities such as WMC, play an important role in granularity. Consistent with the hypothesized mechanisms of granularity, meta-analyses of the neuroimaging literature derived from functional magnetic resonance imaging and positron emission tomography studies (Kober et al, 2008; Vytal and Hamann, 2010; Lindquist et al, 2012; Wager et al, 2015) demonstrate that emotional experiences are associated with increased activity within brain regions related to concept representation and use. ERPs in the late range (300 ms∼) are associated with an “informational processing cascade” when attentional
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