Saying irritated rather than bad
Between someone who distinguishes four shades of annoyance and someone who distinguishes only one, the difference can be measured. It has a name: emotional granularity.
What the notion designates
Lisa Feldman Barrett calls granularity the fineness with which a person distinguishes close states. Saying one is humiliated, disappointed, irritated or worried belongs to high granularity; saying one feels bad belongs to low granularity.
The notion does not bear on the intensity of what is experienced, nor on the quality of the expression. It bears on the number of distinctions actually made in daily experience, which is not the same thing as the vocabulary available.
How it is measured
It is not assessed by questionnaire, which sets it apart from most notions in this field. A person is questioned several times a day over several weeks, asked to rate the intensity of different states, and then one calculates how far these ratings vary relative to one another.
A person whose negative states always rise and fall together obtains a low score. A person in whom anger and sadness dissociate obtains a high score. The measure therefore bears on actual use, not on what the person thinks of their own fineness.
What it is associated with
Literature reviews note that high granularity, especially on the unpleasant side, comes with a more varied repertoire of regulation and less recourse to avoidance behaviours. The effects reported are moderate and observed in several populations.
The direction of the link remains open. Having distinctions available perhaps allows an adapted response to be chosen, since humiliation, disappointment and anger do not call for the same conduct. It may also be that the capacity to regulate provides the opportunity to observe, and therefore to distinguish.
What it is not
It is not a virtue. Finely distinguishing unpleasant states is not pleasant at all, and nothing indicates that high granularity is preferable in every circumstance. A state perceived as a block clutters attention less.
Nor is it a level of culture. A person may know thirty terms and use them interchangeably, another may use five in a perfectly discriminating way. Emotional vocabulary posters make conversation possible; they do not produce granularity.
The link with putting into words
A study published in 2007 by Matthew Lieberman showed that naming a state was accompanied by a drop in amygdala activity, an effect since called implicit regulation because the participants have no intention of regulating and do not believe that naming helps them.
The effect is small, obtained in a laboratory, on brief states. It authorises no promise. It only suggests that naming is not a neutral operation on what is named, which is already not a banal piece of information.
Key points
Granularity designates the number of distinctions actually made, not the vocabulary available.
It is measured by experience sampling, never by questionnaire.
It is associated with a more varied repertoire of regulation, without our knowing which way the link runs.
This article describes documented mechanisms and disagreements. It recommends no position, no party and no vote, and commits to no reading other than that of the work it cites.
And you, where do you stand?
The Civix test situates your convictions on six dimensions and matches you with one of the twelve profiles, without ever telling you what to think.
Start my test