Measuring Clarity of and Attention to Emotions

Abstract

Previous research has found that understanding one's emotions and attending to them are 2 dimensions of emotional awareness. In this research, we examined whether improved subscales for measuring clarity of and attention to emotions could be developed by selecting the best items from 2 frequently used measures of emotional awareness. Using multidimensional scaling and confirmatory factor analysis, we analyzed the Toronto Alexithymia Scale–20 (Bagby, Parker, & Taylor, 1994) and the Trait Meta-Mood Scale (Salovey, Mayer, Goldman, Turvey, & Palfai, 1995) data from 867 college students. Results supported distinct clarity and attention constructs. New subscales were internally consistent and fared as well as or better than previous versions in terms of internal consistency and convergent validity.

View correction statement:

Correction to: “Measuring Clarity of and Attention to Emotions”

Acknowledgments

Patrick A. Palmieri is at the Center for the Treatment and Study of Traumatic Stress and Department of Psychiatry, St. Thomas Hospital, Summa Health System, Akron, Ohio; M. Tyler Boden was at the Department of Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Howard Berenbaum is at the Department of Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. M. Tyler Boden is currently affiliated with the Departments of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences and Psychology at Stanford University.

Notes

¹We note that both self-report scales and performance-based measures are used to assess emotional intelligence (e.g., Brackett & Mayer, 2003; Dizen, Berenbaum, & Kerns, 2005; Gohm & Clore, 2002; Salovey, Mayer, Caruso, & Lopes, 2003). The former typically measure the understanding of one's own emotions, which is the focus of this article, whereas the latter typically measure one's understanding of other people's emotions.

²PsycINFO keyword searches yielded 668 hits for “Toronto Alexithymia Scale,” 44 hits for “Trait Meta Mood Scale,” 5 hits for the “Mood Awareness Scale” (MAS; Swinkels & Giuliano, 1995), and 3 hits for the “Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale” (DERS; Gratz & Roemer, 2004). Searches of the Social Sciences Citation Index yielded 491 citations for the first TAS paper (Bagby, Parker, et al., 1994); 369 for the second one, which was published simultaneously with the first (Bagby, Taylor, et al., 1994); 182 for the TMMS; 44 for the MAS; and 13 for the DERS.

^a Shared variance with Attention (final) scale removed.

^b Shared variance with Clarity (final) scale removed.

^c Shared variance with Attention (TAS–EO) scale removed.

^d Shared variance with Clarity (TAS–ID) scale removed.

^e Shared variance with Attention (TMMS–Attention) scale removed.

^f Shared variance with Clarity (TMMS–Clarity) scale removed.

∗p < .05.

∗∗ p < .01.

³Although we are recommending subsets of items from the TAS and TMMS for researchers who wish to measure attention to and/or clarity of emotion, we also recommend that if a researcher wishes to measure alexithymia, that they use the full original TAS–20.