Emotional variability and clarity in depression and social anxiety

ABSTRACT

Recent research has underscored the importance of elucidating specific patterns of emotion that characterise mental disorders. We examined two emotion traits, emotional variability and emotional clarity, in relation to both categorical (diagnostic interview) and dimensional (self-report) measures of major depressive disorder (MDD) and social anxiety disorder (SAD) in women diagnosed with MDD only (n = 35), SAD only (n = 31), MDD and SAD (n = 26) or no psychiatric disorder (n = 38). Results of the categorical analyses suggest that elevated emotional variability and diminished emotional clarity are transdiagnostic of MDD and SAD. More specifically, emotional variability was elevated for MDD and SAD diagnoses compared to no diagnosis, showing an additive effect for co-occurring MDD and SAD. Similarly diminished levels of emotional clarity characterised all three clinical groups compared to the healthy control group. Dimensional findings suggest that although emotional variability is associated more consistently with depression than with social anxiety, emotional clarity is associated more consistently with social anxiety than with depression. Results are interpreted using a threshold and dose–response framework.

KEYWORDS:

• Social anxiety
• depression
• emotional variability
• emotional instability
• clarity of emotion

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Juliana Gonzales, Kalpa Bhattacharjee, Arkadiy Maksimovskiy, Maria Lemus and Jordan Davis for their help in data collection and preparation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹We recruited women for two reasons. First, women have higher rates of MDD and SAD than do men (APA, 2013). Second, low base rates of these disorders in men made equivalent recruitment across genders untenable, and recruiting fewer men would not have yielded adequate power to examine possible gender differences.

²Post-hoc tests could not be conducted in the analysis that included trait NA and PA.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Institute of Health [grant number MH080683] to Ian H. Gotlib and [grant number F32 MH091831] to Renee J. Thompson.