Abstract
<p>BackgroundGreater complexity in one’s emotional experience is thought to support mental health, including increased diversity in experienced emotions (emodiversity). However, findings linking emodiversity to psychological wellbeing in adults have been mixed, and little is known about its role during adolescence. We examined whether emodiversity across two different emotional contexts – related to self-referential material and to emotional responses to everyday visual scenes – was associated with mental ill-health symptomatology in a community sample of adolescents. MethodsThree-hundred-and-thirty-five adolescents (Mage = 17.1, SD = 0.6, 81.8% female, 71.3% White British) completed two task-based measures of emotional experience, related to the self-concept and standardised visual stimuli, alongside self-report measures of depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress symptoms, and emotion regulation. ResultsGreater negative emodiversity across both tasks was associated with elevated depression and anxiety symptoms, while post-traumatic stress symptoms were associated with greater negative emodiversity for the self-concept only. Lower positive emodiversity for the self-concept was also associated with poorer mental health. There was a small, positive association between the two measures of emodiversity. Negative emodiversity for the self-concept was associated with greater use of maladaptive emotion regulation strategies.ConclusionsFindings suggest that elevated negative emodiversity may represent a transdiagnostic marker of mental ill-health symptomatology in adolescence and highlights the importance of examining different emotional contexts to further elucidate the relationship between emotional complexity and mental health.</p>