Thompson Renee J, Liu Daphne Y, Sudit Ella, Boden Matt
Emotion and Mental Health Lab, Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, United States.
VA Palo Alto Health Care System, Palo Alto, CA, United States.
Front Psychol. 2021 Sep 1;12:685851. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.685851. eCollection 2021.
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; = 48), individuals whose MDD was in full remission (remitted depressed; = 80), and healthy controls ( = 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.
患有当前重度抑郁症（MDD）的人情绪分化能力会下降。我们检验了这样一个假设，即这种情绪障碍是慢性的，并且那些MDD已缓解的人也具有这一特征。作为我们的主要目标，我们结合MDD的两个主要症状——消极情绪强度升高和积极情绪强度降低来研究情绪分化。作为一个探索性目标，我们研究了占主导地位的理论概念，即情绪分化能力低的人在描述他们的情绪体验时使用更笼统的状态词（如“不好”）和更少的情绪词（如“愤怒”）。参与者（通过诊断访谈进行评估）包括患有当前MDD的个体（当前抑郁；n = 48）、MDD已完全缓解的个体（缓解抑郁；n = 80）和健康对照组（n = 87）。参与者还完成了两项抑郁症状的自我报告测量，并通过经验抽样在14天内反复报告即时情绪，我们据此计算情绪分化（即组内相关系数）和情绪强度（即各次调查中平均情绪评分的平均值）。最后，参与者通过开放式回答格式描述一次即时情绪体验，对其中使用的笼统状态词和情绪词进行编码。与健康对照组相比，当前抑郁组和缓解抑郁组的消极和积极情绪分化水平同样较低。这些发现表明，情绪分化能力下降可能是抑郁症的一个稳定特征，也是未来预防工作的一个可能目标。仅在一项抑郁测量中，消极情绪分化能力下降与较高的抑郁症状显著相关，不过在调整消极情绪强度后这一发现并不成立。最后，参与者的情绪分化与笼统状态词和情绪词的使用无关，且各组使用笼统状态词和情绪词的方式与情绪分化的占主导地位的理论概念不一致，这表明该研究领域需要进一步明确。
