Emotion differentiation. A correlate of symptom severity in major depression.

The relationship of emotion differentiation to symptom severity in depression was investigated. The subjects were 25 patients diagnosed with unipolar major depression. Subjects were clinically assessed using the Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia and the Hamilton rating scales for anxiety and depression. In addition, subjects completed a number of self-report measures of symptoms and attitudes. Twelve basic emotion terms were incorporated into free-response attribute lists which subjects used to rate aspects of themselves and of other significant people in their lives. A clustering algorithm (HICLAS) was used to derive a social perception structure from this data for each subject. The differentiation of negative emotion within an individual's structure (NES) was measured by dividing the number of attribute categories containing negative emotions by the total number of categories in that person's structure. The results indicated that NES is a significant correlate of depressive symptomatology independent of self-esteem and other variables. Relatively undifferentiated emotion structure (low NES) was associated with significantly higher levels of depressive symptomatology.