State Emotional Clarity Is an Indicator of Fluid Emotional Intelligence Ability

Summary & key facts

Emotional clarity is the skill of noticing, naming, and understanding your feelings. This paper reviews past research and argues that measuring emotional clarity in the moment — what the authors call state emotional clarity — may show how good someone really is at using emotions, because it depends on reading changing situations as feelings happen. The authors explain how to measure this moment-by-moment clarity, summarize what we already know about the stable, long-term version of clarity (which is tied to better mental health and coping), and suggest future studies on how momentary clarity matters for emotion control, choices, and reaching goals in daily life.

Key facts:

• Emotional clarity means being able to identify and describe your feelings clearly.
• Most past research has measured emotional clarity as a stable trait and linked higher trait clarity to better psychological well-being, better emotion regulation or coping, and fewer mental health problems.
• The paper argues that state emotional clarity — how clear your feelings are in a specific moment — depends on how well you use information from the changing situation around you.
• Because state clarity changes with context, the authors say it may reflect a person’s real emotional ability better than a single, trait questionnaire taken once.
• The authors review different ways to measure state emotional clarity in daily life and give practical recommendations for doing research on these momentary measures.
• They propose future research to test how momentary emotional clarity influences everyday emotion regulation, decision making, and pursuing goals, rather than only studying long-term traits.

Abstract

Emotional clarity is one facet of emotional intelligence that refers to one's meta-understanding of and ability to identify and describe feelings. The existing research has largely focused on trait emotional clarity and its benefits for greater psychological well-being, more successful emotion regulation/coping, and diminished psychopathology. Researchers have begun to examine state or momentary emotional clarity in daily life. In this paper, we situate emotional clarity within the larger literature on emotional intelligence abilities. Then, we argue that state clarity relies on the ability to incorporate information from the dynamic contexts that emotions unfold in and should more closely reflect one's emotional intelligence ability relative to traditional trait measures. In addition, we review and make recommendations for measuring state emotional clarity in daily life and propose future research directions, focusing on how state emotional clarity could inform the study of emotion regulation, decision making, and goal pursuit in daily life.

Topics

Cognitive Abilities and Testing Emotional Intelligence and Performance Personality Traits and Psychology

Categories

Psychology Social Psychology Social Sciences

Tags

Biochemistry Chemistry CLARITY Clinical psychology Cognitive psychology Computer science Coping (psychology) Developmental psychology Emotional intelligence Feeling Programming language Psychology Social psychology Trait

Conditions & symptoms

Anxiety Depression Anxiety or worry Sadness or low mood