What is emotional granularity?

People differ in how emotions affect us.. There are those who experience them in a very particular way, clearly distinguishing between a variety of negative and positive emotions. Others experience emotions in a relatively undifferentiated and global manner, treating a variety of terms as if they were similar and interchangeable.

Imagine that that person who just suffered a significant loss tells you that they feel bad. Now, imagine someone else who, in the same circumstances, says that she feels sad, helpless and upset at the same time. While the first has a very undifferentiated expression, the second is much richer in its expression and, therefore, we will be able to empathize with it more easily. In other words, the emotional granularity of each speech is different.

The emotional granularity

Granularity refers to how specific we are when expressing our emotions. It is the ability to express emotions precisely and in accordance with the context in which they emerge.. In other words, it is the level of specificity that characterizes the expression of an affective experience.

On an emotional level, experience has allowed us to observe that there are people who are better at certain skills linked to understanding emotions. These skills can lead to a better quality of life.

These differences that highlight that some people are “better” or “worse” are represented by different constructs that include: emotional awareness, emotional clarity, emotional complexity, granularity and emotional intelligence.

Granularity is a central aspect of emotional experience that encompasses an entire set of skills that allow us to manifest, understand and regulate our emotions.

High vs. High Granularity low granularity

In everyday life we ​​can observe the level of emotional granularity of others. When we ask someone how they feel, we notice that some people use very specific words to answer us: “happy”, “excited”, “sad” or “angry”; have greater emotional granularity because They are able to express their emotional experience in more precise and differentiated terms, using various labels.

On the contrary, we can find people who, when faced with the same question, answer us in a very vague or global way (“good” or “bad”). These individuals have low emotional granularity, as they express their emotions in general terms, using global labels (typically, pleasure and displeasure).

While highly granular individuals make very detailed distinctions of their emotional experiences, those with lower granularity cannot do so.. For example, those with greater granularity can distinguish anger from other negative feelings, such as fear, loneliness. On the contrary, those who have a lower granularity feel bad without further distinction (understanding that the richness of their speech reflects or is associated with the precision with which they are able to identify their emotional state).

Granularity is not just a verbal representation. Studies that have analyzed the activity of neurons have indicated that it goes beyond the verbal, the expressive. Short and highly granular individuals show very different neuronal activation patterns, because their brains represent emotional experiences in different ways.

This research also indicates that people with high granularity, compared to those with low granularity, use sustained attention and executive control to access conceptual knowledge that allows them to attribute meaning to emotional stimuli.

Thus, mechanisms of emotional granularity may be captured by neural processing beyond emotion labeling itself. These results show us that emotional granularity is also a particular way of experiencing emotion (So et al., 2022).

Benefits of emotional granularity

In the field of emotional granularity, current evidence suggests that it is very beneficial. Having more granular experiences of negative emotions is known to improve mental health and adaptive coping (Kashdan et al., 2015; Smidt and Suvak, 2015).

This component of emotional experience also positively influences affective regulation. In research, it was found that the differentiation of negative emotions is positively related to emotional regulation, particularly when the feelings are more intense. On the other hand, low granularity is associated with a poor emotion regulation strategy.

We can attribute this relationship between granularity and emotional regulation to the theory of feelings as information (Schwarz, 2012). For this theorythe differentiation of emotions allows us to better understand their causes and, therefore, facilitate their regulation.

Granularity, especially that of positive emotions, can have benefits in social relationships. These can translate into a more accurate understanding of the emotional states of others and facilitate interpersonal communication.

The findings of a study indicate that subjects with high emotional differentiation are more able to accurately categorize and recognize the facial expressions of others. Likewise, people with high granularity are better judges of their romantic partners’ emotions.

People with high emotional granularity regulate their emotions better.

How to cultivate granularity

full attention It is a technique that can contribute to the development of emotional granularity. In research in the field, a significant improvement was found in the differentiation of both positive and negative emotions.

Emotional intelligence programs could also be useful for cultivating emotional granularity. It has been shown that training in this intelligence leads to an improvement in the identification and differentiation of emotions. This is because these training programs include emotion differentiation activities.

Other interventions that can be very useful are those in which people are asked to differentiate between positive emotions and reflect on the function of these experiences.

To conclude, emotional granularity is a capacity that allows us to expand the range of recognition and expression of our emotional experience and improve the regulation of those feelings that overwhelm us in certain situations. Through this ability we can keep a more accurate record of what happens to us on an emotional level and predict our future behaviors based on what we feel.

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