Individual differences in emotional experience: Mapping available scales to processes

Increasing interest in individual differences related to emotion is evident in the recent appearance of a large number of self-report instruments desi gned to assess aspects of the feeling experience. In this article, the auth ors review a sample of 18 of these scales and report technical information on each (e.g., length, format, reliability, construct validity, and correla tes). They propose that this domain of individual differences can be useful ly structured into five conceptual categories, including measures of absorp tion, attention, clarity, intensity, and expression. The measures were admi nistered to a sample of individuals, and the coherence of the proposed cate gories was examined through hierarchical cluster analyses. The results conf irmed the proposed structure of this domain of individual difference measur es. The authors argue for the usefulness of an individual differences appro ach to theory testing and specify some of the information-processing roles that might be played by the categories of individual differences found in t he data.