Examining the Reliability and Validity of Ecological Momentary Assessment Response Time Based Measures of Emotional Clarity (Preprint)

BACKGROUND Emotion regulation is an important aspect of both hedonic and eudemonic well-being. One component of emotion regulation is emotional clarity, a person’s ability to lucidly identify the emotion they are experiencing. Emotional clarity has often been assessed with self-report measures, but efforts have also been made to measure it passively, which has advantages such as avoiding potential inaccuracy in responses stemming from social desirability bias and/or poor insight of emotional clarity. Response times to emotion items administered with Ecological Momentary Assessments (EMA) may be an indirect indicator of emotional clarity. Another proposed indicator is the “drift rate” parameter, which can be estimated from the combination of responses and response times to EMA emotion items based on a mental process model for choosing a response (drift diffusion model). An assumption underlying the drift rate parameter is that, aside from how fast a person responds to emotion items, the measurement of emotional clarity also requires consideration of how careful participants were in providing responses. OBJECTIVE This paper examined the reliability and validity of response times and drift rate parameters from EMA emotion items as indicators of individual differences in emotional clarity. METHODS Validity was examined by testing response times and drift rate parameters (from EMA emotion items) for expected associations with six validated scales of relevance to emotional clarity: life satisfaction, neuroticism, depression, anxiety, diabetes distress, and emotion regulation. Because of prior literature suggesting the emotional clarity could be valence specific, EMA items for negative and positive affect items were examined separately. RESULTS Reliability of the proposed indicators of emotional clarity was acceptable with a small number of EMA prompts (i.e., 4 to 7). Consistent with expectations, the average drift rate of negative affect items across multiple EMAs had expected associations with other measures, such as correlations of r=-0.26 (P<.001) with depression symptoms, r=-0.26 (P=.001) with anxiety symptoms, r=-0.16 (P=.013) with emotion regulation difficulties, and r=0.63 (P<.001) with response times to the negative affect items. People with higher NA drift rate responded faster to the NA emotion items, had greater subjective well-being (e.g., less depression symptoms), and less difficulties with overall emotion regulation, which are all aligned with expectation for an emotional clarity measure. Contrary to expectations, the validities of average response times to negative affect items, drift rate of positive affect items, and response times to positive affect items were not strongly supported by our results. CONCLUSIONS Study finding supported the validity of NA drift rate as an indicator of emotional clarity, but not other response time based clarity measures. Further research is needed to examine the validities of passive emotional clarity indicators.