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. 2011 Oct 1;51(5):652-656.
doi: 10.1016/j.paid.2011.06.009.

What You are Feeling and Why: Two Distinct Types of Emotional Clarity

Matthew Tyler Bodena  1 , Howard Berenbaum
Affiliations

What You are Feeling and Why: Two Distinct Types of Emotional Clarity

Matthew Tyler Bodena et al. Pers Individ Dif. .

Abstract

Individual difference approaches have typically treated emotional clarity (i.e., one's understanding of one's own emotions) as a unitary construct. Based on strong theoretical reasons, in this study we explored two related aspects of emotional clarity in a student sample. The first, type awareness, refers to the extent to which people typically can identify and distinguish the types of emotions they experience. The second, source awareness, refers to the extent to which people typically know the causes of their emotions. We psychometrically distinguished self-report items of source and type awareness. Items measuring type awareness were obtained from traditional measures of the construct, clarity of emotions. As no existing measures assess individual differences in source awareness, we developed a set of items with strong face validity. Our results provide initial evidence that one can measure source and type awareness separately.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Facet diagrams for MDS analyses. Note. The left-most panel represents scaling of responses from sample A, the middle panel represents scaling of responses from sample B, and the right-most panel represents scaling of responses from combined samples A & B. Type awareness (labeled “t”), and source awareness (labeled “s”) are separated by the partitioning line.
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