In plain language
Psychology has produced dozens of questionnaires and tests about how people process emotions, but many of them may just measure the same thing under different names. This paper put one unusual test under the microscope: the Levels of Emotional Awareness Scale (LEAS). Instead of asking people to rate themselves, the LEAS presents short scenarios (for example, your best friend wins a prize you both wanted) and scores how richly and precisely people describe what they and the other person would feel — from vague bodily sensations up to nuanced blends like “happy for my friend and angry that I lost.”
Across two studies with university students (124 and 107 participants), the authors compared the LEAS against a wide battery of measures — the Big Five personality traits, empathy, self-esteem, affect intensity, verbal intelligence, an ability-based emotional intelligence test, and self-reported alexithymia — and then experimentally put people into happy, sad, or neutral moods using film clips before asking them to judge their life satisfaction.
The LEAS turned out to be genuinely distinct: it correlated only modestly with openness to feelings, empathy, verbal IQ, and a couple of emotional intelligence subscales, and not at all with most other measures. More strikingly, in both studies people low in emotional awareness let their induced mood color their life-satisfaction judgments (mood congruence), whereas highly aware people did not — they actually overcorrected, judging their lives more harshly when in a good mood. No other measure in the study predicted this pattern. The authors conclude the LEAS captures a distinctive style of emotional processing that matters for how moods bias our thinking.
Key findings
- The LEAS was statistically distinct from a broad battery of measures: it was unrelated to extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, self-esteem, affect intensity, and the overall Toronto Alexithymia Scale score.
- It correlated only modestly with theoretically relevant variables: openness to feelings (r = .29), empathy (r = .23), verbal intelligence (r = .27), and two emotional intelligence subscales (rs of about .20–.21).
- Mood inductions worked equally well for people high and low in emotional awareness — both groups reported similarly strong mood changes after the films.
- In both studies, people low in emotional awareness showed mood-congruent bias (rating life satisfaction higher in a good mood, lower in a bad mood), while people high in awareness did not.
- Highly aware people tended to overcorrect: in Study 2, a positive mood actually produced more negative life-satisfaction judgments than neutral or negative moods among high-LEAS participants.
- No other measure in either study moderated the mood-judgment link, underscoring the unique utility of the LEAS; the authors suggest it is best classified as a measure of emotional processing style rather than personality or ability.
How to cite
APA
Ciarrochi, J., Caputi, P., & Mayer, J. D. (2003). The distinctiveness and utility of a measure of trait emotional awareness. Personality and Individual Differences, 34(8), 1477–1490. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0191-8869(02)00129-0
BibTeX
@article{ciarrochi2003distinctiveness,
title = {The distinctiveness and utility of a measure of trait emotional awareness},
author = {Ciarrochi, Joseph and Caputi, Peter and Mayer, John D.},
journal = {Personality and Individual Differences},
year = {2003},
volume = {34},
number = {8},
pages = {1477--1490},
doi = {10.1016/S0191-8869(02)00129-0}
}
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- All publications by Joseph Ciarrochi (searchable, with free PDFs)
- Process-Based Therapy & Idionomic Analysis
Author: Joseph Ciarrochi (ORCID 0000-0003-0471-8100). Free copy hosted with permission for scholarly use. Please cite the published version via the DOI above.