Emotionality: how well do you know your own feelings?

"How are you?" "Fine."

For some people, that answer is honest. They don't spend much time thinking about what they feel, and they get on with the day.

Others could give you a detailed report: a little restless, slightly disappointed about yesterday, but also looking forward to the weekend. And they can often sense how the people around them are feeling too.

Why are some of us so tuned in to emotions, while others hardly notice them?

In the Big Five model, this is captured by the facet emotionality. It is one of six facets of openness to experience, and it describes how aware you are of your own feelings, how intensely you experience them, and how much you value the emotional side of life.

What does emotionality mean?

The name can easily be misunderstood. In everyday speech, "emotional" often means easily upset or quick to cry. In this facet it means something else: being open to your inner emotional life, rather than shutting it out.

People who score high often recognise themselves in this:

• You experience your feelings strongly, both good and bad.
• You notice your emotional reactions, and often know what triggered them.
• You easily pick up on what others are feeling.
• You understand people who become emotional, and you don't see it as a weakness.
• You see feelings as important information, not as noise.

The key is not how upset you get, but how much access you have to what you feel.

When it is hard to put feelings into words

Psychologists use the term alexithymia for difficulty identifying and describing one's own feelings. It is not a diagnosis, but a personality trait that varies from person to person.

A study from 1999 compared alexithymia with all 30 facets of the five-factor model in 101 university students. People with more alexithymia tended to score higher on neuroticism and lower on extraversion and openness to experience.

At the facet level, the openness facet about feelings, the closest counterpart to emotionality in our test, was one of the facets that predicted alexithymia. In other words, having little access to your feelings and scoring low on emotionality seem to be related, though they are not the same thing.

Knowing what you feel helps you handle it

Why does it matter whether you can tell your feelings apart?

In a study from 2001, participants kept an emotion diary for 14 days. The researchers looked at how finely people distinguished between emotions: whether "sad", "irritated" and "anxious" meant different things to them, or were used more or less interchangeably.

People who drew sharper distinctions between their negative emotions were more likely to try to regulate them, especially when the emotions were strong.

A later research review summed up the field. People who experience their emotions with greater precision, often called emotional granularity, were less likely to resort to harmful coping strategies such as binge drinking, aggression and self-harm when under strong pressure. They also had less severe anxiety and depression.

These studies measured emotional differentiation, not the emotionality facet itself. But they point to a mechanism: knowing what you feel makes it easier to do something sensible about it.

Putting feelings into words calms the brain

A brain imaging study from 2007 tested this directly. Participants looked at negative emotional images. Sometimes they were asked to put a word to the emotion in the image, and sometimes to process the same images in other ways.

When they put the feeling into words, the response in the amygdala, an area that reacts to emotional threats, was weaker. At the same time activity increased in a region in the right side of the frontal lobe.

The researchers call this affect labeling. It may explain why it often helps to say "I'm actually quite nervous" out loud, rather than just feeling the nervousness.

Emotionality is not the same as neuroticism

This is the most important distinction for this facet.

Neuroticism is about how easily you experience negative emotions such as anxiety, anger and sadness, and how hard they hit. Emotionality is about how aware you are of your emotions, both positive and negative.

Imagine two people who both feel low after a conflict at work. One has high neuroticism: the feeling comes quickly and is hard to shake off. The other has high emotionality: she notices exactly what she feels, recognises that it is disappointment rather than anger, and understands why.

The two can go together, but they need not. You can have rich access to your emotions and still be emotionally stable. And you can be easily stressed without paying much attention to what is actually going on inside you.

Emotionality also borders on sympathy in agreeableness. Sympathy is about compassion and wanting to help, while emotionality is more about perceiving and experiencing emotions, both your own and others'.

What does a high or low score mean?

High emotionality

You have good contact with your emotional life and see feelings as an important part of being human. You often notice early when something is bothering you, and you may be good at sensing the mood in others.

The flip side can be that strong feelings take up a lot of space, and that you are affected by the emotions around you.

Low emotionality

You don't spend much time analysing your feelings, and you tend to focus on facts and practical solutions. Many low scorers come across as calm and level-headed in situations where others become caught up in emotions.

That does not mean you lack feelings. You may simply notice them less, or prefer not to dwell on them. Sometimes it can be useful to check in with yourself, because feelings that go unnoticed can still affect sleep, mood and relationships.

Both descriptions are about typical tendencies, not rules that hold in every situation.

In everyday life

• At work: High scorers are often sensitive to the atmosphere in a team and notice early when something is wrong. Low scorers can be a stable, practical presence in emotionally charged situations.
• In relationships: Differences in emotionality are a common source of misunderstanding. One wants to talk about how things feel, the other wants to find a solution. Naming the difference often helps.
• In conflicts: Being able to say what you actually feel, rather than just "I'm angry", often makes it easier to reach a solution.
• With children: Helping children put words to their feelings is a concrete way to build the same skill described in the research above.

Can emotionality change?

Personality is fairly stable, but not fixed. And the ability to recognise and describe feelings seems to be something you can practise.

The 2015 review points out that interventions designed to increase emotional differentiation can both reduce psychological problems and increase well-being. A classic line of research by the psychologist James Pennebaker also found that writing about emotional experiences was followed by improvements in both physical and mental health.

Some simple ways to start:

• Several times a day, ask yourself: what am I feeling right now? Try to be more precise than "fine" or "bad".
• Write a few lines about something that affected you, and what you felt.
• Distinguish between related emotions: disappointed or angry? Nervous or excited?
• Read more about emotional intelligence, which overlaps with this facet.

If strong emotions take over or limit your daily life, it can help to talk to your doctor or a psychologist. A Big Five score is not a diagnosis.

Frequently asked questions

Does high emotionality mean I am sensitive or unstable?

No. Emotionality is about awareness of feelings, not how easily you are knocked off balance. That is measured by neuroticism, which is a separate trait.

Is low emotionality the same as alexithymia?

No. They are related, but alexithymia describes clear difficulties identifying and describing feelings. A low score on emotionality may simply mean that you pay less attention to feelings, or don't place much weight on them.

Are women higher in emotionality than men?

On average, yes. A study of personality data from 26 cultures found that women rated themselves higher on openness to feelings, but also that the differences between the sexes are small compared with the differences within each sex. See how personality differs by age and sex.

How is emotionality measured in the Big Five test?

Our test is based on the IPIP-NEO-120, where each facet is measured with four statements. For emotionality, they are about experiencing your emotions intensely, feeling other people's emotions, and, scored in reverse, rarely noticing your own emotional reactions and not understanding people who get emotional. Read the score as a sign of a pattern, not as a complete description of you.

Find out where you score

Emotionality is only one of the six facets of openness to experience. You can score high on emotionality and still be low on intellect or adventurousness.

Take the Big Five test and see your whole profile, with all 30 facets.

Sources

• Luminet, O., Bagby, R. M., Wagner, H., Taylor, G. J. & Parker, J. D. A. (1999). Relation between alexithymia and the five-factor model of personality: A facet-level analysis. Journal of Personality Assessment, 73(3), 345–358.
• Barrett, L. F., Gross, J. J., Christensen, T. C. & Benvenuto, M. (2001). Knowing what you're feeling and knowing what to do about it: Mapping the relation between emotion differentiation and emotion regulation. Cognition and Emotion, 15(6), 713–724.
• Kashdan, T. B., Barrett, L. F. & McKnight, P. E. (2015). Unpacking emotion differentiation: Transforming unpleasant experience by perceiving distinctions in negativity. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 24(1), 10–16.
• Lieberman, M. D., Eisenberger, N. I., Crockett, M. J., Tom, S. M., Pfeifer, J. H. & Way, B. M. (2007). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli. Psychological Science, 18(5), 421–428.
• Costa, P. T., Terracciano, A. & McCrae, R. R. (2001). Gender differences in personality traits across cultures: Robust and surprising findings. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81(2), 322–331.
• Pennebaker, J. W. (1997). Writing about emotional experiences as a therapeutic process. Psychological Science, 8(3), 162–166.
• Johnson, J. A. (2014). Measuring thirty facets of the Five Factor Model with a 120-item public domain inventory: Development of the IPIP-NEO-120. Journal of Research in Personality, 51, 78–89.