SAMPLE:
175 ADULTS (BELGIAN & AMERICAN)
DATA:
METHOD:
EXPERIENCE SAMPLING, TOPIC MODELING, PCA
ROLE:
RESEARCH CONTRIBUTOR
Experience and Granularity
context.
Daily life rarely looks the same from person to person. Some move through childcare, meetings, and commutes; others spend most of the day in a single environment. These differences shape the emotional richness of everyday experiences. This project examined whether people who navigate more varied daily experiences describe and differentiate their emotions with greater nuance — an ability known as emotional granularity.
approach.
Across three experience-sampling studies, participants described emotional events in daily diaries and rated the intensity of specific emotions. Using the Meaning Extraction Method topic modeling approach and PCA, I helped derive contextual themes from the text (e.g., classroom settings reflected by words like "professor," "lecture"). We then computed a Gini coefficient to quantify each participant's experiential diversity.
Emotional granularity was calculated using intraclass correlations across emotion intensity ratings. Finally, we correlated experiential diversity with emotional granularity, replicating analyses across English and Dutch written and spoken data.
findings.
Individuals with more diverse daily experiences showed higher negative emotional granularity, but not positive granularity.
This effect was robust across written English and spoken Dutch samples.
Emotional granularity appeared to reflect contextual experience, not a fixed personality trait.
impact.
Emotional precision may develop through the diverse experiences people move through in their daily lives. When individuals engage with different tasks, teams, and environments, they encounter a wider range of emotional concepts, which can help them recognize and articulate their feelings with greater clarity. For workplaces, this suggests that cross-functional exposure, varied responsibilities, and teaming across backgrounds can strengthen employees' emotional clarity, resilience, and ability to navigate conflict — core qualities of inclusive, psychologically safe cultures. Designing roles and environments that offer this kind of experiential diversity can meaningfully support healthier emotional processing and more connected, supportive teams.
quote.
Diversification of affective experience is hypothesized to facilitate improvement in emotional granularity.
Affective Science, 4, 291–306
