EMOTIONAL GRANULARITY: FROM METHODOLOGICAL CHALLENGES TO REAL-WORLD IMPLICATIONS FOR EMBODIED AFFECTIVE DYNAMICS

Consistent with the Theory of Constructed Emotion, emotional granularity (EG) refers to an individual's ability to construct precise and context-sensitive emotional experiences.During the last two decades, EG has gained increasing empirical attention because of its theorized adaptive relevance for psychological and physical wellbeing.However, foundational questions remain regarding its measurement, underlying mechanisms in overall allostatic regulation, and related implications for broad affective functioning.This dissertation attempts to advance current knowledge addressing three critical gaps in the literature, integrating a methodological and an applied line of inquiry.First, the intrinsic nature of the construct requires behavioral assessment approaches, which pose numerous challenges for obtaining EG measures that are both valid and reliable.Chapter 1 presents a systematic review that synthesizes existing operationalizations of EG and critically evaluates discrepancies between measurement practices and its underlying theoretical definition.Second, EG is has been speculated to function as an emotion regulation (ER) strategy, positing overlapping processes of emotion generation and regulation.However, the nature of the relationship between EG and ER remains poorly understood.Chapter 2 focuses on clarifying the bidirectional association between within-person positive and negative EG and five ER strategies (suppression, rumination, social sharing, distraction, reappraisal), both in-the-moment and prospectively; to elucidate the mechanisms underlying the EG-ER relationship, we further account for the moderating role of latent sleep patterns, conceived as an index of allostatic regulation in emotional functioning.Third, little is known about how EG is embedded within broader affective functioning and its role in delineating boundaries between emotion and other affective states.Chapter 3 investigates the within-person concurrent and prospective impact of negative EG (both across, between, and within emotion families) on chronic pain intensity.Since interoception is a shared mechanism in both the experience of emotion and pain, we further explored the moderating role of dispositional interoceptive sensibility in the association between EG and pain.Collectively, the results underscore that, on the one hand, there is substantial heterogeneity in EG assessment practices, often reflecting a lack of coherence and a misalignment between the conceptualization and operationalization of EG.On the other hand, the adaptive function of EG appears to vary across the facets under investigation, to be dependent on modulators of allostatic regulation, and to exhibit intraindividual variability contingent upon temporal framing.Overall, this dissertation proposes critical methodological reflections on how EG is currently conceptualized and assessed and provides a context-sensitive and conditional account of its underlying mechanisms and implications for emotional and affective functioning.