Is more emotional clarity always better? An examination of curvilinear and moderated associations between emotional clarity and internalising symptoms

ABSTRACT

Low emotional clarity has been a target for psychological interventions due to its association with increased internalising symptoms. However, theory suggests that very high emotional clarity may also lead to increased symptoms, particularly in combination with high levels of neuroticism. As an initial empirical test of this hypothesis, the present study examined curvilinear associations of emotional clarity with internalising symptoms (i.e. dysphoria, social anxiety, panic, traumatic intrusions) and a moderating role of neuroticism/negative affect in the association across two student samples and two clinical samples (total N = 920). Evidence of curvilinear associations and moderation varied across samples, with some supporting evidence in three samples. Specifically, neuroticism/negative affect moderated the curvilinear association of emotional clarity with traumatic intrusions in Clinical Sample 2 as well as the linear association between emotional clarity and dysphoria in Student Sample 2 and Clinical Sample 1. Simple slope analyses indicated that high emotional clarity was not consistently associated with lower symptoms. Also, the hypothesised quadratic effects of emotional clarity were found in Student Sample 2 and Clinical Sample 1 for panic, and in Clinical Sample 1 for dysphoria. Implications and limitations of these findings for conceptualisations of emotional clarity and current treatments were discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotional clarity
• internalising symptoms
• neuroticism
• negative affect
• curvilinear relationships

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Juhyun Park http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0972-529X

Notes

1 While these findings are generally consistent, one caveat that complicates this literature is that different studies used different self-report measures to assess emotional clarity (i.e., Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale [DERS], Gratz & Roemer, 2004; Trait-Meta Mood Scale [TMMS], Salovey et al., 1995; 20-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale [TAS-20], Bagby et al., 1994), and some of these measures are only moderately associated (e.g., rs = |.43| to |.68|, Coffey et al., 2003; Gohm & Clore, 2002; Kökönyei et al., 2014; Palmieri et al., 2009). A similar issue is found in more recent studies that employed experience-sampling methods to assess emotional clarity with momentary behavioural measures such as reaction times to affect ratings (e.g., Lischetzke et al., 2011; Thompson et al., 2015). In these studies, dispositional emotional clarity was at best modestly associated with the behavioural measure of emotional clarity (e.g., rs = |.05| to |.29|, Lischetzke et al., 2011; Thompson et al., 2015). Taken together, these findings suggest that associations may differ somewhat depending upon which emotional clarity measure was used.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported in part by the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health of the National Institutes of Health under award R21AT009470 (PIs: Naragon-Gainey and DeMarree). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.