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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2020 Jun 1.
Published in final edited form as: Emotion. 2018 May 21;19(4):563–572. doi: 10.1037/emo0000452

Emotional ClarityDevelopment and Psychosocial Outcomes During Adolescence

Liza M Haas 1, Brae Anne McArthur 1, Taylor A Burke 1, Thomas M Olino 1, Lyn Y Abramson 2, Lauren B Alloy 1
PMCID: PMC6249130  NIHMSID: NIHMS965169  PMID: 29781646

Abstract

Past research on emotional clarity (EC), the ability to identify and label one’s own emotions, has illustrated an association between EC deficits and poor psychosocial outcomes during the adolescent years. Although past research has connected EC to psychosocial outcomes during adolescence in cross-sectional and longitudinal designs, no studies have traced the trajectory of EC over time to determine the developmental course of the construct during adolescence. Thus, this study investigated how EC developed over five years during adolescence and what factors were associated with the developmental trajectory of emotional clarity. Participants included a diverse sample of 640 adolescents (M age at Time 1 = 12.55 years; 53.0% female; 52.2% African-American; 48.0% eligible for free school lunch). Results indicated that EC tended to decrease over adolescence, and females, on average, had a steeper decline of EC over time than males. The trajectory of EC predicted psychosocial outcomes, including depression and well-being. Results are discussed with the ultimate goal of informing novel prevention and intervention programs to promote adaptive emotional functioning during an influential time in human development.

Keywords: Emotional Clarity, Psychopathology, Well-being, Adolescence, Longitudinal

Adolescence is a formative time in development, marked by much physical and mental maturation. Specifically, adolescence is an important time for the development of emotion skills; maladaptive emotional development during adolescence can have serious negative consequences, leading to psychopathology (e.g. Hofmann, Sawyer, Fang, & Asaani, 2012), risky behavior, and poor social relationships (for review, see Zeman Cassano, Perry-Parrish, & Stegall, 2006). Inasmuch as emotions are multi-faceted constructs, and broadly, one’s emotional experiences can have a profound impact on psychosocial outcomes, it may be important to examine how deficits in specific emotion abilities are associated with negative outcomes, and how adaptive emotional skills are linked with mental health and resilience. As much research on emotional skills focuses on childhood or adulthood, understanding how particular facets of emotion are related to adolescent adjustment will help to clarify which emotional factors are particularly salient, valuable targets for psychological intervention during this formative period of development.

The present study focused on emotional clarity (EC), the capacity to identify, understand, and discriminate among one’s own emotional experiences (Gohm & Clore, 2000). Although EC is often associated with related factors of emotion regulation, studies have differentiated EC from emotional repair, emotional attention, ambivalence over emotional expressiveness, emotional reactivity, emotional intensity, and emotional inhibition (Gohm & Clore, 2000; Salovey & Mayer, 1990). Emotional clarity also has emerged as a separable factor from emotional acceptance, differentiation, and control (Boden, Thompson, Dizen, Berenbaum, & Baker, 2013; Gratz & Roemer, 2004). Thus, having meta-knowledge about one’s own mood, in conjunction with reflecting on other emotion regulation strategies and the self, might shape an individual’s emotional clarity (Boden et al., 2013; Gratz & Roemer, 2004).

In children and adults, deficits in EC have been linked to poor outcomes, such as depressive symptoms and maladaptive behaviors (e.g., Dvorak et al., 2014; Flynn & Rudolph, 2010, 2014; Salovey, Mayer, Goldman, Turvey, & Palfai, 1995). Interestingly, deficits in emotional clarity in adults can be seen as transdiagnostic risk factors for a variety of psychopathologies, including depression, borderline personality disorder, binge eating, social anxiety disorder, and alcohol use (Vine & Aldao, 2014). Thus, the present study sought to understand what impact EC has on adolescent mental health across development.

Because adolescence is a time of rapid and intense change, it is important to examine how emotional clarity develops during this time. Although several studies have examined emotional clarity’s associations during adolescence, almost all of the investigations have assessed EC at only one time point. Thus, it is unclear how EC might change over time during adolescence, and further, whether there are individual differences among adolescents. Only one investigation has examined EC at multiple time points, revealing that EC increased across adolescence (Rubenstein et al., 2015); however, this study only examined EC across a two-year period. Studies have found that emotional awareness is positively associated with age in adolescents (Eastabrook, Flynn, & Hollenstein, 2014) and adults (Mankus, Boden, & Thompson, 2016), which also suggests that individuals tend to improve at identifying and labeling emotions with greater maturity. Thus, it is likely that EC increases over time for adolescents, although the factors driving this increase are not well understood.

Factors Influencing the Development of Emotional Clarity

Various studies of EC during adolescence document a consistent sex difference, in which boys tend to score higher on measures of EC than girls (Extremera, Durán, & Rey, 2007; Fossati, Feeney, Maffei, & Borroni, 2014; Oliva, Parra, & Reina, 2014; Powell, Coll, Trotter, Thobro, & Haas, 2011; Rubenstein et al., 2015). Like sex differences in internalizing problems (Hankin et al., 1998), sex differences in EC might emerge over time. In a longitudinal study, Rubenstein and colleagues (2015) found that adolescent girls and boys did not differ in EC at Times 1 and 2 in the study (M ages = 12.4 and 13.8 years, respectively), but at Time 3 (M age = 14.7 years), adolescent boys demonstrated greater EC than their female peers. This sex difference may be linked to adolescent girls’ experience of internalizing problems. In a cross-sectional study, Oliva and colleagues (2014) found that emotional clarity was inversely associated with internalizing symptoms for female adolescents, but not for their male peers. Further, EC deficits might lead girls with early pubertal development to experience more symptoms of depression, and low EC moderates the link between peer victimization and internalizing problems for adolescent girls (Hamilton, Hamlat, Stange, Abramson, & Alloy, 2014; Hamilton et al., 2016). Additionally, girls are particularly vulnerable to experiencing decreases in EC when they ruminate as a maladaptive response to depressive symptoms (Rubenstein et al., 2015). Thus, sex differences in EC reveal that, not only do adolescent girls score lower than boys consistently, but this deficit also might place adolescent girls at an increased risk for negative outcomes.

As emotional clarity involves the ability to correctly identify and label emotions, EC development might be driven by cognitive, as well as emotional, factors involving the ability to adequately process and think about emotion information. Rumination, passively and repetitively focusing on negative affect, is a response style for sad mood associated with negative outcomes, such as depression (Nolen-Hoeksema, 1991). In cross-sectional investigations of adolescents, EC is negatively associated with maladaptive cognitive strategies, including rumination (Hatzenbuehler, McLaughlin, & Nolen-Hoeksma, 2008). Further, rumination predicts decreases in emotional clarity over time for female adolescents (Rubenstein et al., 2015). Rumination, as a maladaptive response style, may deplete cognitive resources for emotion processing, or lessen the ability to engage in adaptive coping strategies, such as effective problem-solving (Lyubomirsky & Nolen-Hoeksema, 1995). Rumination is also associated with emotional suppression (Liverant, Kamholz, Sloan, & Brown, 2011); adolescents who ruminate tend to passively focus attention on negative affect, instead of the full spectrum of emotions (positive and negative) that may be accessible to others (Rubenstein et al., 2015). Thus, rumination may be a risk factor for poor emotional clarity development, as adolescents prone to rumination might not have the opportunity to develop an adaptive understanding of their emotional experiences.

Psychosocial Outcomes of Emotional Clarity Development During Adolescence

The study of emotional clarity and its relationship with developmental outcomes during adolescence is a growing field. Most studies that investigate EC during adolescence examine how poor emotional clarity is associated with negative outcomes. Additionally, there is a smaller set of studies examining how adaptive levels of EC during adolescence might lead to positive mental health or resilience.

The most commonly researched outcome of emotional clarity deficits during adolescence is internalizing pathology, specifically anxiety and depression. Generally, EC is inversely related to internalizing outcomes during adolescence, including depression and anxiety, at the same time point and over time (e.g., Hatzenbuehler et al., 2008; McLaughlin, Hatzenbuehler, Mennin, & Nolen-Hoeksema, 2011; Salguero, Palomera, & Fernández-Berrocal, 2012). Prospectively, emotional clarity buffers against increases in negative affect over a one-year follow up period (Ciarrochi, Kashdan, Leeson, Heaven, & Jordan, 2011). EC and depressive symptoms may have a relationship that is cyclical in nature; depressive symptoms predicted decreases in emotional clarity over two years during adolescence (Rubenstein et al., 2015). However, the relationship between poor EC and internalizing problems may be specific to female adolescents (Oliva et al., 2014), which may be due in part to different risk factors that females experience as compared to males. Hamilton and colleagues (2014) found that early pubertal timing (i.e., showing physical signs of puberty earlier than same-sex peers) predicted depressive symptoms for girls with low EC, but not for boys. The results of these studies reveal that EC is linked with internalizing problems during adolescence, and this connection may be stronger for certain groups of individuals, such as adolescent girls.

Inasmuch as a deficit in emotional clarity is often considered a risk factor for negative outcomes, adaptive levels of the construct may be related to important positive psychosocial outcomes associated with well-being. Longitudinally, EC is protective against the development of aspects of negative affect, including fear, hostility, and sadness (Ciarrochi et al., 2011). During adolescence, EC is associated with general mental health (e.g., low distress and high well-being), life satisfaction, optimism, and self-esteem (Extremera et al., 2007; Fernandez-Berrocal, Alcaide, Extremera, & Pizarro, 2006; Salguero et al., 2012). Adaptive personality traits, such as agreeableness, extraversion, openness, and conscientiousness, are all positively associated with emotional clarity during adolescence; conversely, neuroticism, psychoticism, and hopelessness are negatively associated with EC (Ciarrochi, Deane, Wilson, & Rickwood, 2002; Ciarrochi et al., 2011). Further, studies on EC during adolescence reveal a consistent relationship between emotional clarity and other aspects of adaptive emotion regulation, such as a greater ability to regulate feelings (i.e., emotional repair) and a higher tendency to observe, think about, and attend to emotions (Extremera et al. 2007; Fernandez-Berrocal et al., 2006; Salguero et al., 2012). High emotional clarity is also negatively associated with a variety of maladaptive emotion factors, including alexithymia, emotional impulsivity, nonacceptance of emotions, emotional distress, and lacking the ability to carry out goal-directed behavior in the context of negative emotional states (Fossati et al., 2014; Miller, Vachon, & Aalsma, 2012; Perez, Venta, Garnaat, & Sharp, 2012; Powell et al., 2011). These findings demonstrate the utility of emotional clarity as a positive construct associated with adaptive emotional and psychological functioning.

Current Study

Emotional clarity is associated with a wide range of developmental outcomes during adolescence. However, little is known about how EC develops over time, what factors contribute to the developmental trajectory, and how this change might impact adolescent functioning over time. Thus, the current study is the first to examine the developmental trajectory of EC over a five-year period and to investigate how this development is implicated in psychosocial outcomes during adolescence. Based on past research on EC development (Rubenstein et al., 2015), we hypothesized that, in general, adolescents’ EC would improve as they aged.

The present study examined potential predictors of EC development to determine whether various groups of adolescents are more vulnerable to poor EC over time, including girls and adolescents who are prone to rumination. We hypothesized that sex would moderate the development of EC over time, such that male adolescents would improve in EC faster than females. We also predicted that high levels of rumination would contribute to a slower increase in EC development.

This study also assessed psychosocial outcomes that may be associated with EC development prospectively, with the goal of presenting an integrated model of vulnerability and resilience. We hypothesized that slower increases in EC would predict greater levels of depressive symptoms and anxiety symptoms at a longitudinal follow-up. Similarly, we predicted that adolescents who were high in EC and experienced greater increases in EC over time would report greater levels of psychological well-being at a longitudinal follow-up.

Method

Participants and Procedure

Participants in the present study were recruited to participate in a larger prospective investigation of the development of depressive disorders during adolescence, Project ACE (Adolescent Cognition and Emotion). The Temple University Institutional Review Board approved this study. Recruitment for participants occurred through public and private middle schools in the Philadelphia area (approximately 68% of individuals) and through advertisements placed in local newspapers (approximately 32% of individuals). Project ACE has various inclusion criteria, including being 12 or 13 years old at the start of the study, having a female caregiver who was willing to participate in the study, and self-identifying as White/Caucasian, Black/African-American, or Biracial. Adolescents were excluded if they were not competent in reading or speaking English, had mental retardation, a severe learning disability or cognitive impairment, a psychotic disorder, a severe developmental disorder, or any other medical or psychiatric problem that would not allow the adolescents or their caregivers to participate in the study (for a description of Project ACE, see Alloy et al., 2012). Project ACE is still underway and retention rates are likely to change as individuals continue to participate. At the time of the current investigation, 80% of participants completed at least one follow-up visit, and 72% of the sample is continuing in the study.

The current study included 640 racially and socioeconomically diverse adolescents and their female caregivers (93% were the adolescents’ biological mothers). Of the current sample, 53.0% were female, 52.2% were African-American, and 48.0% were eligible for free school lunch, an indicator of low socioeconomic status. The average age at Time 1 was 12.55 years (SD = 0.88). See Table 1 for information about the current sample and timing of study assessments. At Time 1, adolescents completed inventories of emotional clarity, rumination, depressive symptoms, and anxiety symptoms, as well as other measures that were not included in the present investigation. At all subsequent assessments, adolescents completed all of the same measures except the rumination inventory. At the long-term follow-up, participants completed the same measures, plus a measure of psychological well-being. Adolescents who completed a Time 1 assessment only did not significantly differ on any of the primary study variables as compared to adolescents who completed at least one follow-up assessment (Table 2).

Table 1.

Demographics and Study Information

Variable Mean (SD) N (%)
Female - 339 (53.0%)
Black - 334 (52.2%)
Eligible for free lunch - 307 (48.0%)
Age at Time 1 (in years) 12.55 (0.88) -
Age at Time 2 (in years) 13.91 (1.02) -
Age at Time 3 (in years) 14.60 (0.80) -
Age at Time 4 (in years) 15.53 (0.72) -
Age at Time 5 (in years) 16.58 (0.77) -
Age at Time 6 (in years) 17.94 (0.73) -
Months from Time 1–Time 2 14.94 (3.81) -
Months from Time 2–Time 3 10.03 (4.11) -
Months from Time 3–Time 4 11.34 (4.27) -
Months from Time 4–Time 5 12.26 (3.93) -
Months from Time 5–Time 6 16.00 (4.10) -
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Table 2.

Comparison of participants who completed Time 1 only or at least one follow-up assessment on primary study variables

Variable t p
Sex −0.28 0.78
Race −0.39 0.69
Eligible for free lunch 1.50 0.13
EC Time 1 0.86 0.39
Rumination Time 1 −1.29 0.20
CDI Time 1 −0.61 0.55
MASC Time 1 0.73 0.47
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Note. EC = Emotional Clarity Questionnaire, Rumination = Rumination subscale of the Children’s Response Styles Questionnaire, CDI = Children’s Depression Inventory, MASC = Multidimensional Anxiety Scale for Children.

Measures

The Emotional Clarity Questionnaire (ECQ; Flynn & Rudolph, 2010) is a self-report measure including 7 items adapted from the Trait-Meta Mood Scale for adults (Salovey & Mayer, 1990). The scale, designed to measure perceived emotional clarity, asks youth to rate their responses to items on a 5-point Likert scale, from not at all to very much. Each item asks how youth experience feelings, including “My feelings usually make sense to me,” and “I usually know how I am feeling.” Total scores range from 5–35, and higher scores indicate greater levels of EC. The ECQ has good internal validity and also convergent validity with congruent behavioral measures that assess the ability to process emotions (e.g., identifying affect in facial expressions; Flynn & Rudolph, 2010). EC was measured at Times 1–5 in the current study. In the Project ACE sample, the ECQ had good internal reliability at Times 1–5 (α= 0.83–0.91).

The Children’s Depression Inventory (CDI; Kovacs, 1985) is a self-report measure of current depressive symptomatology for children and adolescents. The measure uses 27 items and asks youth to report on symptoms over the past two weeks. The CDI is designed for individuals aged 7–17, and it is the most widely-used self-report inventory to assess symptoms of depression in children and adolescents. Items include behavioral, affective, and cognitive symptoms of depression scored from 0–2. Higher scores indicate greater depressive symptomatology, and total scores can range from 0–54. The CDI has demonstrated good validity with adolescents (Klein Dougherty, & Olino, 2005). In the current study, depressive symptoms were assessed at Times 1–6. In Project ACE, the CDI had good internal reliability at Times 1–6 (α = 0.85–0.89).

The Multidimensional Anxiety Scale for Children (MASC; March, Parker, Sullivan, Stallings, & Conners, 1997) is a self-report measure consisting of 39 items to assess anxiety symptomatology in youth. The MASC gathers information about anxiety in a variety of domains, including separation anxiety (e.g., fear of being separated from parents), physiological symptoms (e.g., heart racing, tenseness, restlessness), social anxiety (e.g., performance fears, fear of negative evaluation from others), and harm avoidance (e.g., perfectionism). On a 4-point Likert scale, the measure asks participants to rate each item on a scale of 1 (never) to 4 (often). To create a total score, all items are summed, with greater scores indicating more severe symptoms of anxiety. The MASC demonstrated excellent internal and retest reliability and also has good discriminant and internal validity (March et al., 1997; March & Albano, 1998). This measure was given at Times 1–6, and the total score was used. The MASC had good internal reliability at Times 1–6 in Project ACE (α = 0.86–0.91).

The Scale of Psychological Well-Being (PWB) is a self-report questionnaire that aims to measure current healthy mental functioning across six dimensions, including autonomy, environmental mastery, personal growth, positive relations with others, purpose in life, and self-acceptance (Ryff, 1989; Ryff & Singer, 1996). The PWB inventory includes 42 items, consisting of six subscales. Individuals are asked to respond to the items on a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 6 (strongly agree). All subscales are summed to give a total score, with high scores indicating greater well-being and low scores indicating poor functioning. The PWB subscales have been found to have good internal consistency in college students; van Dierendock, 2005). A short (18-item) version of the PWB has been used with adolescent samples (Garcia & Siddiqui, 2009), and the long version is significantly negatively correlated with depression and anxiety in college students (Kitamura et al., 2004). Psychological well-being was measured for participants at Time 6. The PWB had excellent internal consistency in Project ACE at Time 6 (α = 0.92).

The Children’s Response Styles Questionnaire (CRSQ; Abela, Vanderbilt, & Rochon, 2004) is a self-report measure that assesses youths’ cognitive responses to sad or depressed mood. The CRSQ contains 25 items across three subscales: rumination, problem-solving, and distraction. On the measure, participants are asked to rate how frequently they experience feelings and thoughts when they are sad on a scale from 1 (never) to 4 (almost always), in which higher scores for each subscale indicate a greater tendency to engage in that response style when experiencing a depressed or sad mood. In the present study, scores from the rumination subscale of the CRSQ were used at Time 1. Research suggests that the CRSQ has good internal consistency (Abela et al., 2004), and in Project ACE, internal reliability of the rumination subscale at Time 1 was α = 0.86.

Data Analysis

The current study examined change in emotional clarity prospectively, as collected over five time points that occurred within approximately five years. Given measurements of EC occurring over time, nested within individuals, the use of multilevel growth curve modeling with individual times of observations was appropriate. This design allowed for sensitive measurement of EC in order to provide an accurate examination of the rate of change that occurred over time within individuals, by estimating growth curve models while incorporating individual times for each assessment with the following formulas: Level 1, ECti = π0i + π1i*(Timeti) + εti; Level 2, π0i = β00 + r0i, π1i = β10 + r1i. This data analytic strategy allowed for an idiographic (person-centered) approach to the measure of EC change over time. Further, multilevel growth curve modeling was advantageous because it maximized data usage by flexibly accounting for missing data. Analyses were conducted using MPlus (Muthén & Muthén, 1998–2017). The present study tested a developmental question by tracking the rate of change of EC over a period of time, which could be adequately assessed with a sample of 50 participants (Maas & Hox, 2005).

The study also analyzed predictors of EC change over time. These analyses were conducted via hierarchical linear regressions within a multilevel growth curve modeling framework to test whether certain variables measured at Time 1 (sex, rumination) predicted the slope and intercept of EC development over time (Times 1–5). Further, multilevel growth curve models were estimated within the same framework, to determine if the rate of EC development predicted psychosocial outcomes at a long-term follow-up, Time 6. Baseline levels of these outcome measures were controlled for when available.1

Results

Descriptive Results

Descriptive statistics of the study variables measured at each time point can be found in Table 3. Table 4 presents bivariate correlations for each study variable at the first time point it was assessed.

Table 3.

Descriptive statistics of study variables

Variable Time 1 Time 2 Time 3 Time 4 Time 5 Time 6
Mean (SD) Mean (SD) Mean (SD) Mean (SD) Mean (SD) Mean (SD)
EC 28.24 (4.82) 27.73 (5.53) 27.36 (5.29) 28.27 (5.13) 27.18 (5.84) -
Rum 24.55 (7.69) - - - - -
CDI 7.30 (6.04) 7.92 (7.24) 7.47 (6.37) 6.97 (6.41) 7.24 (5.98) 6.65 (6.38)
MASC 41.25 (14.49) 38.84 (16.66) 37.50 (14.37) 36.62 (14.97) 35.92 (14.06) 32.26 (16.29)
PWB - - - - - 195.32 (27.87)
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Note. EC = Emotional Clarity Questionnaire; Rum = Rumination subscale of the Children’s Response Styles Questionnaire; CDI = Children’s Depression Inventory; MASC = Multidimensional Anxiety Scale for Children; PWB = Scale of Psychological Well-being.

Table 4.

Correlations of study variables at first time point measured

Variable 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
1. Sex −.03 −.01 .14** −.09 .13* .18** .06
2. Race 1 .43** −.01 .08 .01 .15** .02
3. Lunch 1 .01 −.04 .10 −.05 −.12
4. Rum 1 −.25** .46** .46** −.03
5. EC 1 −.41** −.26** .18
6. CDI 1 .33** −.15
7. MASC 1 −.01
8. PWB 1
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Note

*

significant at the p < .05 level,

**

significant at the p < .01 level;

Lunch = eligible for free school lunch; EC = Emotional Clarity Questionnaire, Time 1; Rum = Rumination subscale of the Children’s Response Styles Questionnaire, Time 1; CDI = Children’s Depression Inventory, Time 1; MASC = Multidimensional Anxiety Scale for Children, Time 1; PWB = Scale of Psychological Well-being, Time 6.

Development of EC across Adolescence

The trajectory of EC from Time 1–Time 5 was estimated using multilevel modeling growth curves. Linear, quadratic and cubic models were estimated. The linear model was significant indicating that EC decreased over time (B = −0.092, SE = 0.043, p = 0.03; See Figure 1). Overall, individuals significantly differed on their baseline levels of EC (intercept; B = 2.82, SE = 0.021, p < 0.001). There was significant within-participant residual variance in the slope of EC (r0i = 0.18, SE = 0.06, p = 0.002) and in the intercept of EC (r1i = 0.13, SE = 0.02, p < 0.001).

Figure 1.

Figure 1

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Linear trajectory of emotional clarity from Time 1 to Time 5. Shaded areas represent 95% confidence intervals.

Factors Influencing the Development of Emotional Clarity

Sex and Rumination (measured at baseline) were added as predictors of baseline levels and linear growth for the EC linear growth model tested above. The effects of these predictors were tested simultaneously, to determine their influence on the linear trajectory of EC. Sex significantly impacted the trajectory of EC (B = −0.24, SE = 0.086, p = 0.004). Compared to males, who appeared to have a stable trajectory of EC over time, females, on average, had a steeper decline of EC over time (See Figure 1). Males also were more likely to exhibit higher levels of EC at baseline compared to females (B = −0.12, SE = 0.041, p = 0.003).

Rumination at Time 1 (B = 0.004, SE = 0.005, p = 0.44) did not significantly impact the trajectory of EC across adolescence (Times 1–5). However, individuals lower in rumination had higher levels of EC at baseline than those with higher levels of rumination (B = −0.01, SE = 0.003, p < 0.001).

Psychosocial Outcomes of Emotional Clarity Development During Adolescence

To examine whether the trajectory of EC impacted psychosocial outcomes (depression, anxiety, and well-being) at the long-term follow-up (Time 6), individual models for each outcome were examined separately. Additionally, given the significant sex differences presented above, the following models were tested separately for males and females. However, the results did not differ by sex, and thus, are presented for the overall models.

Controlling for Time 1 levels of depression, higher EC slope values (i.e., more positive) were associated with lower levels of depression at the long-term follow-up (B = −4.92, SE = 2.40, p = 0.04). Further, controlling for Time 1 levels of anxiety, the trajectory of EC did not significantly predict anxiety symptoms (B = −7.27, SE = 8.51, p = 0.39) at follow-up. Finally, higher EC slope values were associated with greater psychological well-being at the long-term follow-up (B = 0.32, SE = 0.09, p < 0.001).

Discussion

The study of emotional clarity during adolescence is a growing field of interest. As only one study to date (Rubenstein et al., 2015) has traced the development of emotional clarity over time, the present investigation is the first to demonstrate that EC tends to decrease in a linear fashion over the adolescent years, particularly for female adolescents. This finding is counter to the primary hypothesis that EC would increase over time, which was supported by past research using a subset of the same sample (Rubenstein et al., 2015). However, Rubenstein and colleagues (2015) only examined participants in Project ACE who had completed at least three study sessions and found that EC tended to increase from Time 1 (M age = 12.39) to Time 3 (M age = 14.72). The present study examined all participants in Project ACE and used multilevel growth curve modeling to maximize data usage by flexibly accounting for missing data. This statistical technique allowed the present study to include more participants in the investigation, and interestingly, revealed that sex differences in EC may explain the tendency for decreasing EC over adolescence. Results indicated that over five time points (from M ages 12.55 – 17.94), EC tended to decrease in a linear fashion for females, while remaining relatively stable for males. The primary finding that EC decreases linearly over time for females suggests that, rather than emotional clarity building and crystallizing over the adolescent years as experience with emotion grows, adolescence may be a time when emotional experiences become more puzzling for girls. Further, in accordance with hypotheses, decreases in the trajectory of EC predicted higher levels of depressive symptoms and increases in EC predicted higher levels of psychological well-being. Examining how EC changes over time, what factors predict this change, and what psychosocial outcomes this change may impact is a crucial step in understanding how adolescents comprehend their emotional experiences during a time of much psychological development.

The primary finding that EC decreases across adolescence for girls, while boys’ EC remained high and stable, was counter to hypothesis and warrants further attention. As a construct, EC is difficult to measure, and in the present study, EC was captured via self-report. Therefore, EC as discussed in the current study represents each adolescent’s perception of his or her ability to understand and label feelings. However, it is possible that the self-report of EC may not be an accurate reflection of how clear individuals actually are about their emotional states. Broadly, there are limitations to using self-report to assess psychological symptoms in children, and consistently, children’s reports of their own symptoms differ from reports from other informants, such as parents or teachers (De Los Reyes & Kazdin, 2004). In a study to assess the ecological validity of adolescents’ self-reported emotion regulation, Vasilev and colleagues (2009) found that adolescents’ self-reported emotion regulation ability was longitudinally associated with physiological responding to emotional material during childhood, as measured by respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA). However, as a subscale of the same emotion regulation measure, self-reported EC was not associated with RSA activity (Vasilev, Crowell, Beuchaine, Mead, & Gatzke-Kopp, 2009). Thus, although there are limitations to relying on self-report in general, and specifically, self-reported EC, evidence suggests that adolescents’ reports of their overall emotion regulation abilities may have ecological validity.

Further, when the ECQ (Flynn & Rudolph, 2010) was created for use with children and adolescents, it was examined alongside two laboratory tasks of facial emotion recognition. Although high scores on the ECQ were associated with greater right hemispheric specialization of facial recognition (which predominately occurs in the right hemisphere) and fewer mistakes in identifying displays of affect via a facial recognition paradigm (Flynn & Rudolph, 2010), recognizing facial expressions is not the same as being clear about emotions in oneself. Therefore, it is possible that self-reported EC is a proxy for other constructs that measure how individuals feel about themselves, including self-assuredness or self-confidence. Thus, the tendency for girls to report decreasing levels of EC throughout adolescence may represent declines in self-confidence as life becomes more stressful during the adolescent years. Moreover, it is also possible that the self-reported decrease in EC may not suggest that adolescent girls are losing a skill they once had; instead, it may indicate that females are experiencing a greater complexity of emotional and interpersonal experiences, which leads girls to believe that they are unable to be clear about their emotional experiences. To clarify the construct of EC, future studies might measure self-reported EC following mood induction in a laboratory alongside psychophysiological measures (e.g., heart rate, skin conductance) to measure arousal. Taking the difficulty of measuring EC into consideration, the results of the present study must be interpreted with the understanding that EC represents a self-perception that may be related to self-esteem as well as emotional intelligence.

Notably, examining sex differences in the decreasing trajectory of EC during adolescence revealed key differences between males and females. The results are consistent with past research documenting that adolescent boys tend to score higher than girls on measures of EC (Extremera et al. 2007, Fossati et al., 2014; Oliva et al., 2014; Powell et al., 2011; Rubenstein et al., 2015). The present results indicate that, for girls, understanding emotions may become increasingly more difficult during adolescence. As women pay more attention to emotions and are better than men at differentiating between emotions (Mankus et al., 2016), it is possible that during adolescence, females begin to experience a greater variety of specific emotions that lead them to become less clear about their emotional states. Further, inasmuch as males tend to pay less attention to emotions, differentiate between emotional experiences less adeptly than females (Mankus et al., 2016), and experience lower intensity of emotional experience (Grossman & Wood, 1993), it is possible that boys self-report maintaining high and stable EC throughout the adolescent years because they may have access to less complex and less intense emotional material than their female peers.

The present study examined whether rumination, a well-established risk factor for depression (Nolen-Hoeksema, 1991) predicted the trajectory of EC over time. Past research indicates that for adolescent girls, responding to depressive symptoms with rumination may lead to decreased EC over time (Rubenstein et al., 2015). Findings from the present study, however, suggest that although rumination at baseline did not predict the trajectory of EC during adolescence, individuals higher in rumination at baseline exhibited lower levels of EC at baseline when compared to those with lower levels of rumination. Therefore, in early adolescence, high rumination is linked with poorer EC. This result is congruent with past investigations linking low EC and rumination cross-sectionally (e.g., Hatzenbuehler et al., 2008). Ruminating may exhaust cognitive resources for the processing of emotions, which might increase present confusion regarding emotional experiences. Further, rumination and emotional clarity may be bi-directionally related, such that being less clear about emotional experiences may also contribute to a passive, repetitive focus on negative affect. Because this relationship may be cyclical in nature, true experiments are needed to clarify the causal relationship between emotional clarity and rumination during adolescence. The present results indicate that experiences of rumination appear to have a concurrent, but not predictive, relationship with EC during early adolescence.

Additional results from the current study indicate that individuals with a steeper decline in EC over time had higher depression scores at the long-term follow-up, when controlling for baseline levels of depression. This finding demonstrates a crucial connection between decreases in EC and depression. Notably, the finding that EC declined more steeply for adolescent girls than boys may align with past research indicating that adolescent girls are more likely to become depressed than boys. Alternatively, greater EC growth over time predicted a positive psychological outcome, well-being. As well-being is a multifaceted construct that represents more than the absence of psychopathology, this result indicates that increases in emotional clarity during the adolescent years may be associated with flourishing and positive mental health. Past research has linked high EC with aspects of positive psychological health during adolescence, such as optimism and openness, but most of these studies have been cross-sectional (e.g., Ciarrochi et al., 2002; Extremera et al., 2007; Fernandez-Berrocal et al., 2006; Salguero et al., 2012). Thus, improvements in emotional clarity over the formative years of adolescence may be an important path to well-being. However, the implications of this finding are limited because the present study was unable to control for baseline levels of well-being. Therefore, it is unknown whether adolescents who experienced high levels of psychological well-being at the long-term follow-up also experienced high levels at baseline. Future research could examine how the trajectory of EC changes with psychological well-being to provide a more complete understanding of how EC relates to positive psychological health.

Further, the trajectory of EC was not predictive of anxiety. This result was counter to primary hypotheses and suggests that further attention is needed to understand the relationship between EC and anxiety. Past research indicates that EC predicts anxiety during adolescence when accounting for the effects of thought suppression and low self-esteem (Fernandez-Berrocal et al., 2006). However, the current results suggest that changes in EC during adolescence may not have the same predictive impact on anxiety during late adolescence.

The present study had several key strengths and a number of limitations that could be addressed in future investigations. First, this study utilized a large, diverse community sample of adolescents followed over five years during a formative time in development. The longitudinal design allowed for sophisticated statistical analyses to examine the predictive impact of certain variables on the development of other variables. The sample examined in the present study was collected from a large, urban area and may be more representative of adolescents with low SES than other studies of EC during adolescence. Although the majority of studies on adolescent EC also utilized community samples, the diversity of these communities varies widely (i.e. urban vs. rural areas, North America vs. Western Europe). Additionally, participants in the current study were White/Caucasian, Black/African-American, and Biracial only (these groups were selected based on larger aims of Project ACE), which limits the generalizability of the findings because it does not examine adolescents from other racial and ethnic backgrounds. Thus, future research is needed to examine the impact of cultural factors, race and ethnicity in a variety of populations, and SES on the development of EC over time. Further, this study examined a variety of psychosocial factors, and it was the first longitudinal study to track EC change across the adolescent years.

On the other hand, one limitation of the present study was the reliance on self-report measures, which may limit the ecological validity of the findings. Further, this study relied solely on adolescents’ reports of their current functioning, and future studies might benefit from the perspective of other people in the adolescents’ lives, such as parents and teachers, to obtain a more comprehensive understanding of various psychosocial domains. In Project ACE, female caregivers are asked to report on various measures about themselves and their children, yet the study does not include caregivers’ reports of their children’s emotional clarity. Thus, caregivers’ perceptions of the children’s emotional clarity could be an important target for future research. Finally, because there were sex differences in the trajectory of EC during adolescence, subsequent studies might control for sex in analyses to determine how the trajectory of EC predicts psychosocial outcomes irrespective of sex.

Critically, the results of this investigation have clinical implications for adolescent mental health. First, it seems that EC changes during adolescence, especially for girls. Inasmuch as evidence suggests that emotional intelligence is mutable (Brackett, Rivers, & Salovey, 2011), EC may prove to be a fruitful target for intervention. Because a large part of the adolescent experience takes place in the school context, developing workshops in school that teach adolescents how to better identify and become aware of their emotional experiences might be especially advantageous (Hamilton et al., 2016). In teaching emotional clarity, interventions should be careful to focus on fostering clarity above simply drawing attention to emotions. Research indicates that drawing attention to emotions without promoting understanding may backfire, leading to increased rumination and prolonged dysphoria (Ramos, Fernandez-Berrocal, & Extremera, 2007). Increasing EC through prevention and intervention programs might decrease problematic outcomes for adolescents, such as depression, and increase positive outcomes, such as psychological well-being.

Overall, as the most comprehensive longitudinal study of adolescent emotional clarity, the present study determined that EC tends to decrease across adolescence, and that this decrease may be limited to adolescent girls. Further, EC decreases are associated with depression, and EC increases are linked with psychological well-being. Learning how EC develops during adolescence contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of the construct. Future studies could expand on the current findings by exploring which interventions may improve EC during adolescence. Results from the present study, along with future research on emotional clarity development during adolescence, will set the foundation for psychological interventions that may promote adolescent mental health.

Acknowledgments

Funding: This research was supported by National Institute of Mental Health grants MH79369 and MH101168 to Lauren B. Alloy. Brae Anne McArthur was supported by a Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Taylor A. Burke was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Student Research Fellowship.

Footnotes

1

Baseline measures of depressive and anxiety symptoms were included as covariates. Well-being was not measured at baseline, and thus, was not included as a covariate.

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