What Role Does Emotional Granularity Play in Adolescent Depression and Anxiety? A Scoping Review

Mental health problems are most prevalent during adolescence. Emotional granularity, the ability to identify distinctions between different emotion states in our mental experience, is said to contribute to the onset and maintenance of depression and anxiety in adults, through the evidence for its role in adolescent depression and anxiety is less well established. Theoretically, better emotional granularity facilitates adaptive selection and targeted deployment of emotion regulation strategies to manage negative emotions, thereby bolstering mental health.

In this mixed methods scoping review, 40 studies of emotional granularity in adolescents (aged < 25) were examined to establish: (i) how it is measured; (ii) its relationship with measures of anxiety/depression; and (iii) if it is related to and/or moderates the relationship between emotion regulation and anxiety/depression. Adolescent contributors with a lived experience of depression/anxiety were interviewed to gain their insights on emotional granularity.

The review revealed: (i) the most common method of measuring emotional granularity was with ecological momentary assessment; (ii) good evidence that lower emotional granularity tracked greater levels of depressive symptomology, with less evidence for a relationship with levels of anxiety; and (iii) inconclusive evidence of granularity moderating the relationship between emotion regulation and depression/anxiety. Adolescent contributor views are presented, and knowledge gaps in our understanding and suggestions for further research are discussed.

Emotional granularity well may be related to depression in adolescents, but crucially, there were few studies focussing on younger adolescents and no studies with adolescents diagnosed with anxiety or depression, so conclusions drawn are tenuous.