Article
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

Emodiversity and the Emotional Ecosystem

By: Jordi Quoidbach, June Gruber, Moira Mikolajczak, Alexsandr Kogan, Ilios Kotsou and Michael I. Norton

Format:Print

Abstract

Bridging psychological research exploring emotional complexity and research in the natural sciences on the measurement of biodiversity, we introduce—and demonstrate the benefits of—emodiversity: the variety and relative abundance of the emotions that humans experience. Two cross-sectional studies across more than 37,000 respondents demonstrate that emodiversity is an independent predictor of mental and physical health—such as decreased depression and doctor's visits—over and above mean levels of positive and negative emotion. These results remained robust after controlling for gender, age, and the five main dimensions of personality. Emodiversity is a practically important and previously unidentified metric for assessing the health of the human emotional ecosystem.

Keywords

Health; Diversity; Emotions

Citation

Quoidbach, Jordi, June Gruber, Moira Mikolajczak, Alexsandr Kogan, Ilios Kotsou, and Michael I. Norton. "Emodiversity and the Emotional Ecosystem." Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 143, no. 6 (December 2014): 2057–2066.