Emotion differentiation (ED) task
The laboratory counterpart to computing emotional-granularity from daily life: instead of waiting for a person’s own emotional episodes, present everybody the same ones. Adapted from Nook et al. (2018) and Israelashvili et al. (2019); the wiki holds one implementation, the online version in Ventura-Bort, Wendt & Weymar (2021).
Structurally it is affective-picture-viewing with a second pass added. Pass one is the classic IAPS + SAM protocol that stands behind the wiki’s Dunn disagreement. Pass two — rate each of eight discrete emotions on the same image — is what converts it into a differentiation instrument.
The wiki’s one datum is a null, and it is informative
In 127 participants, no measure derived from this task was predicted by anything: not intensity, not arousal, not positive or negative granularity, by either factor of interoceptive/emotional self-report, with no interactions. The same participants’ DRM data produced four significant effects.
Two things follow, and the wiki should keep them apart.
The methodological reading (the authors’). The task under-specifies the emotion. Normed pictures modulate the core-affect dimensions reliably and the categorical layer unreliably, and eight labels cannot represent whatever state a mutilation photograph produces. Prior successful uses had more labels or one valence. This is a diagnosis of the implementation, and it comes with a design recommendation: when using standardized stimuli, a wider label set is required.
The substantive reading (the wiki’s, and speculative). If granularity is the resolution of a person’s own emotional life, an instrument that supplies both the event and the vocabulary may be measuring how well the supplied labels fit a supplied picture — a question about stimulus norms as much as about the person. The DRM/ED contrast in this one paper is consistent with that, and does not establish it: the two tasks also differ in number of observations, in valence coverage, and in recall vs. online rating.
Either way, the practical note for reading this wiki: a null on the ED task is not evidence of no relationship with granularity, and the paradigm has not yet demonstrated in the wiki’s sources that it can detect one.