Emotional specificity and attributional clarity in daily life: Associations with depression, rumination, and...

This study used a qualitative approach to examine how specificity in emotional labeling (reflecting greater differentiation) and clarity of emotion attributions in daily life are associated with depressive symptoms and cognition (rumination and overgeneralization). Participants were 191 young adults (74% female, racially/ethnically diverse, mean age 19) who completed baseline measures and a 14-day daily diary that included two prompts about their current experience of negative emotion. Participant-generated negative emotion labels and open-ended descriptions were coded for level of specificity and attributional clarity, respectively, by two trained coders with acceptable interrater agreement. Results revealed that participants made use of many nonstandard labels (87% of words) to describe their emotions, words that would not have been captured using standard emotion rating scales. Momentary specificity was unrelated to momentary rumination and overgeneralizing cognitions and was also unrelated to traditionally derived negative emotion differentiation (using intraclass correlations). However, attributional clarity significantly predicted momentary rumination and overgeneralizing as well as depressive symptoms. Our results point to limitations with specificity coding but suggest that momentary attributions may play a pivotal role in depression and depression-related cognitions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).