466 v. AFFECTI vE PROCESSES
(Craig, 2009). The ability to sense and re -
port one’s own bodily responses is known 
as interoception,  and involves three distinct 
processes (Craig & Craig, 2009; Critchley 
& Garfinkel, 2017): subjective awareness of 
bodily sensations, such as heart palpitations 
or shallow breathing; the ability to provide 
accurate estimates of visceral activity, such 
as heart or respiration rate; and metacogni -
tive interoception, or awareness of how ob -
jectively accurate one’s estimates of bodily 
activity tend to be.
People differ considerably in each aspect 
of interoception, and these difference matter 
for emotion (Critchley & Garfinkel, 2017). 
Studies consistently find that people who de -
scribe their body’s activity more accurately, 
such as those who can estimate their current 
heart rate with little error, experience emo -
tions more intensely (Barrett, Quigley, Bliss- 
Moreau, & Aronson, 2004; Wiens, 2005). 
They are better able to reinterpret their emo -
tions in ways that enable them to respond 
adaptively to their present circumstances 
(Füstös, Gramann, Herbert, & Pollatos, 
2012). At the same time, they are a bit more 
vulnerable to anxiety, overly sensitive to 
shifts in heart rate, circulation, blood pres -
sure, sweaty palms, and the effects of corti -
sol release on the body that accompany anx -
ious states (Domschke, Stevens, Pfleiderer, 
& Gerlach, 2010). However, people’s objec -
tive interoception accuracy correlates only 
modestly with their subjective awareness of 
bodily sensations. For example, people with 
autism are not skilled at reading the cues in 
their body (e.g., they perform poorly in the 
heartbeat detection paradigm), but believe 
that they are (Garfinkel et al., 2016).
Specialized literatures have begun to ex -
amine individual differences in the aware -
ness of different bodily responses, and their 
implications for emotion. Some people are 
particularly aware of their blush response, 
and this bias is associated with higher levels 
of introversion, shyness, and social anxiety 
(Neto, 1996). People vary dramatically in 
the frequency with which they experience 
the chills, and this variation predicts, for 
example, their likelihood of finding music 
aesthetically pleasing—  a tendency linked 
to openness to experience across cultures 
(McCrae, 2007; Silvia & Nusbaum, 2011). 
Children on the autism spectrum appear to be more sensitive to emotion-  related touch 
(Riquelme, Hatem, & Montaya, 2016). Fu -
ture studies characterizing people who cry 
easily or are more sensitive to butterflies in 
the stomach will reveal the intriguing im -
plications of sensitivity to these emotion- 
related sensations.
Emotional Differentiation and  the Dynamics 
of Subjective Experience
A final development in the science of emo -
tion with particular relevance to personal -
ity psychology involves differentiation in 
and dynamics of people’s emotional expe -
rience. How much precision do people use 
in describing the quality of their emotions? 
Which emotions tend to “hang together” in 
a given person’s experience over time? The 
ability to measure emotion at multiple time 
points in the real world, via diary studies 
and experience sampling, is moving the field 
beyond studies of emotional reactions mea -
sured at one point in time to the study of 
how emotions unfold in patterns over time, 
and individual differences in the dynamics 
of emotional experience.
Some people differentiate emotion into 
a wide variety of categories; they lead and 
describe emotionally complex lives, experi -
encing many distinct flavors of positive and 
negative emotion. For others, the emotion 
realm has fewer varieties of experience. Re -
searchers have referred to this aspect of the 
language of emotion as emotional granulari -
ty or emotion differentiation  (e.g., Kashdan, 
Barrett, & McKnight, 2015; Quoidbach et 
al., 2014; Smidt & Suvak, 2015). When peo -
ple rate their experience of several emotions 
on multiple occasions, high average inter -
correlations among items across time points 
within the same person indicate low levels 
of granularity—  the person experiences a lot 
of positive or negative feeling, or very little, 
at any given time. Low average intercorrela -
tions among emotion items indicate a per -
son with high granularity, or fine-  tuning of 
emotional experience into more precise cate -
gories. For example, a high-  granularity per -
son might report feeling primarily amused 
at one moment, proud at another, and com -
passionate at yet another, with low ratings 
of all other positive emotions. Emotional 