Experience sampling study reveals compressed emotional concept structures in young adults with depression and anxiety, suggesting new targets for emotional health interventions.
Key Points
To investigate whether daily emotional covariation patterns relate to changes in conceptual emotion structure and symptom severity in individuals with depression and anxiety.
Assessed young adults (N=88, aged 18-23, collected during 2022) using a 14-day experience sampling protocol combined with pre-post semantic similarity assessments across two studies.
Modeled emotional conceptual organization by combining low-dimensional emotion space differentiation (Dimension 1 weight) and semantic similarity network metrics (path lengths and transition probabilities).
Higher symptoms of depression and anxiety were linked to lower Dimension 1 weight (reduced differentiation), shorter network path lengths (denser similarity networks), and increased transition probabilities.
Depression was associated with rigid and congruent daily emotional covariation patterns, whereas anxiety was linked to unstable, incongruent patterns; semantic networks demonstrated plasticity over time.