A question that can help control negative emotions.
Understanding how you feel — and being able to describe it — can protect against depression, research finds.
Young people who could describe their emotions in more precise ways were better at fighting off depression caused by stressful life events.
Differentiating emotions helps people to regulate them more effectively.
For example, identifying a feeling as frustration, rather than just ‘feeling bad’, can better help a person deal with it.
So, the simple question that may help protect against depression is: how do I really feel?
The study included 193 adolescents who reported their emotions four times a day over a week.
When they were were followed up 18 months later, young people better at differentiating their emotions were less susceptible to depression.
Dr Lisa Starr, the study’s first author, explained:
“Adolescents who use more granular terms such as ‘I feel annoyed,’ or ‘I feel frustrated,’ or ‘I feel ashamed’ — instead of simply saying ‘I feel bad’ — are better protected against developing increased depressive symptoms after experiencing a stressful life event.”
On the other hand, those who did not distinguish between being ashamed or annoyed, for example, were more likely to let stressful life events get them down.
Dr Starr said:
“Emotions convey a lot of information.
They communicate information about the person’s motivational state, level of arousal, emotional valence, and appraisals of the threatening experience
A person has to integrate all that information to figure out — “am I feeling irritated,” or “am I feeling angry, embarrassed, or some other emotion?”
It’s going to help me predict how my emotional experience will unfold, and how I can best regulate these emotions to make myself feel better.”
It may be possible to increase people’s sensitivity to their emotional states, Dr Starr said:
“Basically you need to know the way you feel, in order to change the way you feel.
I believe that NED could be modifiable, and I think it’s something that could be directly addressed with treatment protocols that target NED.
Our data suggests that if you are able to increase people’s NED then you should be able to buffer them against stressful experiences and the depressogenic effect of stress.”
The study was published in the journal Emotion (Starr et al., 2019).
