Experimental research explores thought-feeling connections in individuals with varying attention to emotion, suggesting implications for self-regulation.
Some people report attending to their feelings and valuing them, whereas others do not. Such individual differences, in attention to emotion, could alter the extent to which thoughts are related to feelings. In the present research, 180 participants completed a novel stream of consciousness paradigm in which they were asked to report on thoughts and feelings that occurred during 12 blank intervals. Thoughts related to relationships and good things in life were linked to pleasant feelings and thoughts related to problems in life and uncertainties were linked to unpleasant feelings. These thought-feeling relationships were more pronounced at higher, relative to lower, levels of attention to emotion. Cross-level interactions tended not to be significant when emotional awareness was represented by emotional clarity, suggesting that attention and clarity function differently. The results link attention to emotion, in particular, to a type of experiential openness that may benefit self-regulation.
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Robinson et al. (2026) studied this question.
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