When you rear-end the car in front of you at a stoplight,
you may feel a mix of different emotions such as anger, anxiety, and guilt. The
person whose car you rear-ended may feel angered and frustrated by your
carelessness, but it’s unlikely that he’ll feel much guilt.
The ability to identify and distinguish between negative
emotions helps us address the problem that led to those emotions in the first
place. But while some people can tell the difference between feeling angry and
guilty, others may not be able to separate the two. Distinguishing between
anger and frustration is even harder.
In a study forthcoming in Psychological Science, a journal
of the Association for Psychological Science, psychological scientist Emre
Demiralp of the University of Michigan and his colleagues hypothesized that
clinically depressed people would be less able to discriminate between
different types of negative emotions compared to healthy individuals.
Clinically depressed people often experience feelings of sadness, anger, fear,
or frustration that interfere with everyday life.