Emotional Styles: Associations with Childhood Trauma and Family Expressiveness
Previous research has categorized individuals into four groups, which have been labeled as emotional styles (hot, overwhelmed, cerebral, and cool). Emotional style groups have been defined on the basis of different emotional traits, attention, clarity, and intensity. Behaviors of emotion regulation and forms of psychological distress, depression, worry, and positive schizotypy have been found to be associated with different emotional styles. Therefore, we know that emotional styles are important. However, there has not been any research that has examined the reasons why people develop different emotional styles. The current study was the first to investigate this issue by examining childhood trauma and family expressiveness. A total of 245 female college students, from a mid-western university, were administered a battery of questionnaires, including the attention scale of the Trait Meta-Mood Scale (TMMS), which assessed attention to emotion, the clarity scale of the TMMS, which assessed emotional clarity, the Affect Intensity Measure (AIM), which assessed affect intensity, the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ), which assessed childhood trauma and the Family Expressiveness Questionnaire (FEQ), which assessed family expressiveness. The current study showed that emotional styles differed in their experiences of family expressiveness, but not childhood trauma
School:
Florida International University
Department:
Psychology
Research Advisor:
Howard Berenbaum
Department of Research Advisor:
Psychology
Year of Publication:
2008