In order to change, people need to become aware of their sensations and the way that their bodies interact with the world around them. Physical self-awareness is the first step in releasing the tyranny of the past.
— Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score (2014)
The Overview
Emotional awareness is the ability to notice what you are feeling. To make that awareness useful, you also have to put words to it. It is the shift from a vague “I feel bad” to a specific “I feel frustrated because I was interrupted” or “I feel anxious about tomorrow.” This lesson teaches you how to build both skills through three core practices: a daily emotional check-in, a body scan, and a partner check-in.
The idea is simple: you already experience emotions, and those emotions drive your actions. The goal is to catch them as they happen and name them accurately. That skill—noticing and naming—is the foundation for everything else in this curriculum.
Emotional awareness is not emotional control. You are not trying to force yourself to be calm or change the feeling itself; you are just trying to see it clearly. When people cannot tell their feelings apart, they often use the wrong tools to cope. For example, they might try to handle exhaustion the exact same way they handle anger, which rarely works. But when you accurately identify what is happening inside, you can choose a response that fits the situation. With this clarity, people tend to act less aggressively, build better relationships, and cause less harm.
Two things will help you as you begin. First, your body feels emotion before your mind does. Anger shows up as heat and tension. Fear often feels like a drop in your stomach. If the first time you notice anger is when you hear yourself shouting, you have caught it too late. Second, your vocabulary limits your options. Most people stop at basic words like happy, sad, angry, and scared. But resentment requires a different response than anger, just as disappointment differs from sadness. More precise language gives you better choices for what to do next.
This work is hard. Paying close attention to your internal state can be uncomfortable, and stress makes it even harder to process those feelings. On the days you need this clarity the most, your words will be the hardest to find. That is why repetition matters. Building this skill takes months of consistent effort. By practicing these three techniques now when the stakes are low, the muscle memory will be there when the pressure hits.
The Challenge
Someone criticizes you, or an anxious thought surfaces, and your body reacts. Your jaw clenches. Your heart races. Your breathing quickens. Before you consciously choose how to respond, the feeling drives your behavior. You might snap at the person, walk out of the room, shut down, cry, throw something, or hit someone. You might go quiet in a way the other person is forced to interpret. You can run through this entire sequence without observing a single step, only noticing the damage after the fact.
When angry, people who struggle to identify exactly what they are feeling react more aggressively than people who understand their emotions clearly (Pond and colleagues, 2012). The escalation is rarely a conscious choice. It happens because you never saw it coming.
In a relationship, your unchecked behavior triggers your partner. Your partner reacts to your outburst, and you react to their defense. Neither of you chose the pattern, but both of you keep it running. Couples in this position have the same argument repeatedly, and each repetition damages the relationship.
This dynamic dictates who stays in your life. If you cannot pinpoint what you feel, you cannot tell anyone what you need, forcing the people around you to guess. They will often guess incorrectly, and this leads to conflict. Over time you end up feeling alone even with them in the room, and it is that feeling that wears the relationship down (Panahi and colleagues, 2018).
Emotional blindness distorts how you perceive reality. When an emotion goes unrecognized, it frequently disguises itself as an objective fact. If you do not realize you are anxious, you simply believe a situation is dangerous. If you do not realize you are frustrated, you assume the project you are working on is impossible. Because you cannot see the emotional lens you are looking through, you are prone to making permanent decisions—quitting a job, ending a partnership, abandoning a goal—based on temporary internal states you do not even know you are experiencing.
When this difficulty reaches clinical levels, psychologists call it alexithymia: difficulty identifying or describing your own emotional states. When you cannot name what is happening, the only move left is to make it stop. The ways of making it stop fast are the ones that cost you later. People who struggle to identify their feelings harm themselves more (Norman and colleagues, 2020), think about suicide more (Hemming and colleagues, 2019), and drink and use more (Honkalampi and colleagues, 2022).
An emotion you never catch still runs in your body. Anger carried for years raises your risk of heart disease (Chida and Steptoe, 2009). In the two hours after an angry outburst, the risk of a heart attack runs more than twice as high (Mostofsky and colleagues, 2013). Some people feel emotional distress as physical illness instead, and the ones who report the most unexplained physical complaints are exactly the ones who have the hardest time telling an emotion from a sensation (De Gucht and Heiser, 2003).
The ultimate challenge of an unobserved emotion is that it operates quietly in the dark. You cannot change an emotional loop that you are unaware of. You cannot reconsider what an event means to you if the event never clearly came into focus. To choose a different response, you have to catch yourself in the loop at some point. When this cycle runs unchecked, you are not actually making choices—you are stuck reacting in whatever ways you have been programmed to respond. The psychologist Carl Jung said it plainly: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
The Benefit
Someone criticizes you. Your jaw clenches, your heart races, your breathing quickens — all of it exactly as before. The difference is that you feel it happen. There is a moment now between the feeling and what you do with it, and inside that moment you can speak or wait, stay or go.
When you are angry and you know it, you have a chance to do less damage with it. People who can tell their unpleasant feelings apart act less aggressively on the days they are angriest (Pond and colleagues, 2012).
When a disagreement starts, catching your own physical reaction changes the dynamic. You feel the heat rise before you speak, giving you a chance to choose words that do not immediately trigger your partner’s defenses. The fight you have had a hundred times requires both of you to keep it going. You can choose to step out of the loop.
You can also say what you need, so the people around you stop guessing and stop guessing wrong. People who cannot do this lose their support systems over time (Ciarrochi and colleagues, 2008). And as you tune into yourself, other people become easier to read (Israelashvili and colleagues, 2019).
A mood stops being a fact about the world. You notice you are anxious instead of concluding the situation is dangerous. You notice you are frustrated instead of concluding the project is impossible. The decisions you were about to make permanently — quitting, ending it, giving up — turn back into decisions you can make later, once the state has passed.
The fast ways of shutting a feeling off lose their pull, because you are no longer trying to get rid of something you cannot name. People who can tell their unpleasant feelings apart drink less, binge less, lash out less, and abandon treatment less often (Seah and Coifman, 2022).
None of this makes the feeling smaller. Anger arrives at the size it arrives, and catching it early is not a way to get rid of it. Catching it does not tell you what to do — knowing you are furious does not tell you whether to speak or wait. It does not fix what caused it. Knowing you are grieving does not bring anything back.
That is what the rest of this curriculum is for. Simply noticing a feeling is not enough to change how you behave — what matters is what you do next (Smith and colleagues, 2026). People who cannot tell their feelings apart do not reach for worse strategies than anyone else. They reach for the exact same tools, but because they apply them blindly, those tools fail (Kalokerinos and colleagues, 2019). Noticing your feelings makes change possible.
Which is why it comes first. What to do with fear and anger, how to stop a thought from circling, when to hold a boundary and when to bend, how to repair what you broke, how to let gratitude and joy actually reach you — these skills start here.
The Practice
All three of these practices involve repetition. What you are building is the ability to catch a feeling while it is still happening and put a word to it. That skill comes from doing it many times when very little is at stake, so that the ability is there when something actually is. They work from different directions—on your own, through the body, and with another person. Start with the first, and add the others once it is running smoothly.
The Daily Emotional Check-In
The emotional check-in takes about a minute or two and is simple enough to do standing in a hallway. You stop what you are doing, run down a fixed list of emotions, and note which ones are present and how strongly.
Set two to six alarms spread evenly across your morning, afternoon, and evening. Waiting until you spontaneously notice a feeling is the exact problem you are trying to solve—for the first few weeks, let the alarms do the noticing for you. When an alarm sounds, follow these steps:
Rate the core emotions. Run down this fixed list of eleven words and give each a score from 0 to 10 based on how strongly you feel it right now. Most will be 0, and you can pass over them in a second.
- Curiosity: The open, leaning-in feeling when something catches your interest and makes you want to look closer or understand it better.
- Fear: The tight, bracing sensation when you sense a threat, danger, or the possibility that something might go badly.
- Joy: A bright, lifting sensation when things are good. It can feel like a quiet internal warmth or a sudden burst of lightness and excitement.
- Anger: The hot, energized feeling that rises up when a boundary is crossed, when something is unfair, or when you are frustrated and blocked from what you want.
- Peace: The quiet, settled feeling when nothing is urgently pulling at your attention and you do not feel the need to change anything about the present moment.
- Sadness: The heavy, dropping sensation that comes with loss, disappointment, or recognizing that something you care about is gone.
- Connection: The secure, anchored feeling of being in tune with someone else, where you feel seen, understood, and part of a shared experience.
- Guilt: The heavy, uncomfortable feeling of remorse when you realize you have caused harm or violated your own standards. It often brings a sinking sensation, a dropped gaze, and the urge to hide or fix the mistake.
- Caring: The outward-flowing feeling of warmth and concern for someone else’s well-being, bringing an urge to support or look out for them.
- Disgust: The strong, rejecting feeling that makes you want to pull back, close off, or push something away because it feels gross, toxic, or wrong.
- Attraction: The magnetic pull or urge to move closer to someone or something, whether that pull is physical, emotional, or mental.
Locate the feeling. For any score above zero, pinpoint exactly where the sensation sits in your body—the jaw, the chest, the stomach, the throat, and the shoulders are the usual places. Two or three emotions registering above 0 at once is normal; blends are where most of the feelings that have no clean name actually live.
Check your physical baseline. Check three physical states: tired, hungry, and in pain. These physical states are frequently mistaken for emotions. A high score on anger at four in the afternoon that turns out to be hunger is a common and useful discovery.
Record your data (optional). If you find it helpful, keep a quick note in a journal, a spreadsheet, or a notepad app on your phone with the date, the time, the words above 0 with their numbers, and where you felt them. If nothing is there, write down that nothing was there. A flat check-in is data, not a failed attempt.
For the first few weeks, rely entirely on the alarms to prompt you. Eventually—usually around week three—the words will begin arriving on their own. You might be mid-conversation and suddenly realize you are feeling guilt without having run through the list.
When this spontaneous recognition starts, begin naming your emotions exactly as they happen. When an emotion surfaces, label it in the moment—out loud if you have the privacy, or silently if you do not. If it is a blend, name the blend. Acknowledging, “This is anger, and underneath it is fear,” is much more useful than forcing a single label.
Keep the scheduled alarms running even after this shift happens. The daily check-ins are the physical maintenance that keeps the vocabulary accessible; catching your feelings in real time is simply the reward for doing the maintenance.
The Body Scan
The body scan is the second practice. Here, you move your attention slowly through your body to notice what is physically present without trying to change any of it. Lie on your back somewhere you will not be interrupted, or sit upright if lying down puts you to sleep, and close your eyes.
Using a guided audio track, such as the 3-Minute Body Scan from UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center, is much easier than working from memory at the start.
Begin at your feet and work upward through the lower legs, knees, thighs, hips, lower back, stomach, chest, upper back, shoulders, arms, hands, neck, throat, jaw, face, and scalp. Rest your attention on each area for a few breaths. Notice whatever is there—warmth, pressure, tightness, aching, tingling—and notice when there is nothing at all. Some regions may stay blank for weeks, which is a normal finding rather than a problem.
Your mind will naturally wander. That is not a failure; noticing where your mind went and bringing it back to the body is the practice itself. Start with just three minutes a day. You can gradually work your way up to ten minutes as you get more comfortable. While these sessions can eventually extend to thirty minutes or more, that is not required. Doing it consistently matters; once a day for a few minutes is plenty to build the foundation.
The Partner Check-In
In the third practice, you and another person take turns exploring your emotional and physical states aloud. The entire exercise takes about ten to twelve minutes. Sit facing each other, agree in advance who will speak first, and set a timer for about two and a half minutes per answer so that neither of you is watching the clock.
The listener asks two specific questions in sequence. After asking a question, the listener remains completely silent—offering no responses, no reassurance, and no fixing—until the speaker is finished answering.
“Describe a situation within the last 24 hours in which you experienced a difficult emotion, and how did it feel in your body?”
The listener thanks the speaker, then asks the second question:
“Describe a situation within the last 24 hours in which you felt grateful, and how did that feel in your body?”
Once the speaker finishes answering the second question, the listener thanks them again, and the roles swap.
This practice improves your ability to put feelings into words more than your ability to identify them, which is why it works alongside the solo check-in rather than replacing it (Silveira and colleagues, 2023). If the exercise turns into a conversation about a conflict between the two of you, stop and come back to it another time. This is not the place to work on the relationship.
A Note on Attention
Paying closer attention to your internal state is not automatically better for everyone. Turning up your awareness to what you feel when there is nobody around to help you carry it can occasionally leave you feeling overwhelmed (Goldman and colleagues, 2025). If starting these practices makes you feel worse, and it stays that way for weeks, that is information about your current circumstances rather than a failure on your part, and it is a reason to get support in place before you continue.
What to Expect
None of these practices require equipment or money, none of them are physically strenuous, and most people can do all three without trouble. But a few things are worth knowing before you start, mostly so that normal parts of the process do not feel like you are doing it wrong.
With body scans, you might encounter intense feelings or physical discomfort that you have been unconsciously ignoring. Noticing your bodily sensations can sometimes trigger a sudden wave of grief, anxiety, or physical tension. This is not a sign that the practice is failing or that you are doing it wrong. If it ever feels like too much to handle, pause the practice. Discomfort is fine. If you are feeling overwhelm, stop the practice and seek support before continuing.
Progress is often hard to see from the inside. Day-to-day changes are usually small. If you judge the practice solely by whether you “feel different,” you might conclude nothing is happening. That is the value of keeping a written record. The notes give you objective data. Over time, the information in your notes can reveal patterns your memory may miss.
It takes a season, not a few days. Building this kind of awareness takes time. Plan on practicing consistently for a couple of months rather than expecting a quick fix in a week.
Hard days make you go backward. On the day after a stressful event, people actually get worse at telling their feelings apart (Erbas and colleagues, 2018). So on the days you want these tools the most—during a fight, a deadline, or after bad news—you will have the fewest words available. This is completely normal. Your nervous system is just simplifying things to help you survive the pressure.
Doing more is not better. Forcing extra check-ins or doubling the length of your body scan will not speed things up. The people who show the greatest improvement in emotional awareness from these practices tend to fit them easily into their ordinary lives, and they don’t hate doing them (Bornemann and colleagues, 2014). Steady, everyday practice drives progress better than forced effort. If you feel stuck, change your approach to make it easier, rather than just pushing yourself harder.
The Evidence
What Happens Without Awareness
People who can tell their unpleasant feelings apart are less aggressive on the days they are angriest. Three separate studies followed college students through several weeks of daily diaries, each day recording both their emotions and their behavior. Researchers scored each person on how finely they told their negative emotions apart — whether their answers actually moved with what was happening to them that day, rather than describing every bad day the same way — then compared people who scored high on that measure to people who scored low, on the specific days each person was angriest. On those days, the people who told their feelings apart most precisely acted less aggressively than the people who didn’t: 17% less in the first study, 43% less in the second, and 16% less in the third (Pond and colleagues, 2012). Nobody was taught anything here — this compares people who already differ, not the effect of a practice.
Being unable to name your feelings leads to loneliness, and to a less satisfying marriage. Researchers surveyed 216 people from 115 couples on how well they could name their feelings, how supported they felt, how lonely they were, and how satisfied they were in their marriage. The harder someone found it to name what they felt, the lonelier they were; and the lonelier they were, the less satisfied with their marriage (Panahi and colleagues, 2018). A separate study of 155 couples traced the same route with one more step in it: the harder it was to name feelings, the lonelier the person; the lonelier the person, the less they confided in their spouse; and the less they confided, the worse the marriage — for husbands and wives alike (Frye-Cox and Hesse, 2013).
People who struggle to identify their feelings harm themselves more. Researchers pooled 23 studies covering 8,724 people. The questionnaire they all used separates trouble identifying what you feel from trouble putting words to it, and people with more of either harmed themselves more. It also measures a thinking style aimed at outside events rather than inner ones, and that made no difference. The pattern was stronger among teenagers than among adults. One study inside the set followed 566 teenagers over time: those who had the most trouble naming their feelings at the start were the ones harming themselves five months later (Norman and colleagues, 2020).
People who struggle to identify their feelings think about suicide more. Researchers pooled 34 studies covering 10,104 adults, measuring two separate things: how much someone thinks about suicide, and whether they have attempted it. The link to thinking about suicide was strong, and it held up when researchers accounted for age, gender, and how depressed someone was. The link to attempting was much weaker, and under that same scrutiny it did not hold up — other factors accounted for it (Hemming and colleagues, 2019).
People who struggle to identify their feelings drink and use drugs more. Researchers pooled 52 studies covering 22,712 people, comparing those with substance problems against those without. Substance users had more trouble identifying what they felt and putting words to it. How big the difference was depended a great deal on who was being studied: it was largest among people in treatment for a substance problem, smaller in the general population, and smallest among college students. It was also about twice as large in samples that were mostly men (Honkalampi and colleagues, 2022).
Anger you carry, and anger you let out, both show up in the heart. Researchers pooled 25 studies that followed initially healthy people over time, measuring their anger and hostility and then tracking who developed coronary heart disease. People with higher anger and hostility were about a fifth more likely to develop heart disease over the following years (Chida and Steptoe, 2009). Separately, nearly 4,000 people hospitalized for a heart attack were asked whether they had experienced an angry outburst in the two hours before it started, and compared that to how often they were angry at other times. The risk of a heart attack was roughly two and a half times higher in the two hours after an outburst, and it rose further the more intense the anger was (Mostofsky and colleagues, 2013). Both findings are about anger itself — not about whether noticing the anger changes anything — but they show what an unexamined feeling does in the body.
People who have the most trouble telling a feeling from a bodily sensation report the most physical symptoms. Researchers pooled 18 studies measuring how well people could identify their emotions alongside how many physical symptoms they reported. People who struggled more to name their feelings reported more symptoms (De Gucht and Heiser, 2003). The link was strongest for distinguishing feelings from bodily sensations — precisely the confusion the lesson describes. The evidence is correlational, so it cannot establish that difficulty identifying feelings causes more symptom reporting.
People who cannot identify their feelings lose social support and feel more sad and fearful. Researchers surveyed 667 Australian high school students in Grade 8 and again in Grade 9, measuring their ability to identify emotions, the quality and quantity of their social support, and their positive and negative affect. Students who started with lower emotion identification skill ended the year with less social support, less positive affect, and more fear (Ciarrochi and colleagues, 2008). Among boys, low identification also predicted increases in sadness.
What Awareness Enables
People who know their own feelings tend to read other people better. Researchers measured how precisely people could tell their own feelings apart — by having them rate emotionally charged photographs using the same set of emotion words, then checking whether their ratings shifted from one picture to the next. They then tested people’s ability to read emotions in three ways: from faces alone, from faces with body and voice, and from the eyes only. People who told their own feelings apart more precisely were better at reading other people on all three tasks, and the result replicated across two studies with different populations (Israelashvili and colleagues, 2019). The direction is not established — it could be that reading yourself helps you read others, or that reading others sharpens your own vocabulary, or both.
People who can’t tell their feelings apart use the wrong tools for the job. Researchers tracked people through their daily lives, measuring both how finely they told their emotions apart and which strategies they used when distressed. People who struggled to distinguish their feelings used the same strategies as everyone else — reappraisal, distraction, social sharing, and so on. But because they couldn’t tell what they were actually feeling, they applied those strategies to the wrong problem. The strategies didn’t reduce their negative emotion as much (Kalokerinos and colleagues, 2019).
People who can tell whether they feel anxious, ashamed, or angry — instead of just “bad” — are less likely to act aggressively, binge eat, relapse into substance use, skip treatment, or self-injure. Researchers pooled 17 studies covering 2,182 people, looking at those behaviors together. People who told their negative emotions apart more precisely had fewer of those problems, and the link held even after accounting for how much negative emotion they felt overall — so it wasn’t simply that less distressed people differentiate better (Seah and Coifman, 2022). The result was the same whether the samples came from clinical or community populations. The entire evidence base is correlational, and the self-injury finding wasn’t significant when examined on its own.
Emotional awareness alone has a small impact on aggression — it is a foundational skill, not the destination. Researchers pooled 137 studies covering 252,605 people, examining how six facets of emotion regulation relate to aggressive behavior: impulse control, access to strategies, goal-directed behavior, non-acceptance of emotions, emotional clarity, and emotional awareness. Emotional awareness had the weakest association with aggression of all six. Impulse control, access to strategies, and the ability to direct your behavior all mattered more. Awareness is the starting point, not the thing that changes behavior on its own (Smith and colleagues, 2026).
What the Practices Do
After six weeks of rating their emotions several times a day, people were better able to tell unpleasant feelings apart — no longer just saying “I feel bad.” Researchers randomly assigned 79 adults with diagnosed depression to either six weeks of rating ten named emotions ten times a day, three days a week, or to a control group. The practice was the only intervention — no teaching, no vocabulary instruction, no therapy content. People who rated their emotions became better at telling their negative feelings apart; the control group did not change (Widdershoven and colleagues, 2019). Positive emotions showed an upward trend, but the study was too small to detect it reliably. There was no dose-response — people who completed more ratings did not improve more than people who completed fewer.
Naming fear out loud while you feel it leaves you calmer when you face future fears. Researchers randomly assigned 88 spider-fearful adults to one of four conditions during live exposure to a real spider: describe your fear in emotion words, describe the spider in neutral words, talk about your house, or exposure with no instruction. A week later, when exposed to a different spider in a different room, the people who had named their fear showed a larger drop in skin conductance than the other groups — and the more fear words they used, the greater the drop (Kircanski and colleagues, 2012). There was no significant difference in self-reported fear at any timepoint — the body carried the effect, not the conscious sense of feeling better.
Three months of body scan improves your ability to read the body for what you’re feeling. Researchers randomly assigned 148 healthy adults to either practice body scan and breath meditation for 13 weeks, or to a control group that was tested again without any training. The practice group did 20 minutes of body scan plus 10 minutes of breath meditation five days a week, plus weekly two-hour classes. After three months, they were better at connecting body sensations to emotional states — the people who liked the practice and integrated it into daily life improved the most (Bornemann and colleagues, 2014).
A compassion-focused, partner-sharing practice lowered the body’s actual hormonal stress response, not just how stressed people said they felt. Researchers trained 313 healthy adults in three different types of mental practice over nine months. One group practiced paying attention to their body and breath. Another group practiced compassion and shared their emotional experiences with a partner. A third group practiced taking other people’s perspectives. All three types made people feel less stressed when tested in a lab stress situation. Only the compassion and partner-sharing practice actually changed the body’s stress response — cortisol levels dropped by up to 51%. The attention and body-scan practice only changed how people reported feeling, not what their bodies were doing (Engert and colleagues, 2017).
Sharing emotional experiences with a partner for just 12 minutes a day helped people improve their ability to put their feelings into words. Researchers assigned 285 adults to one of two practices: either twelve minutes daily of solo mindfulness training, or twelve minutes daily with a partner where you take turns describing a difficult emotion you felt in the last 24 hours and how it showed up in your body, then describing something you felt grateful for and how that felt in your body. After ten weeks, both groups improved at describing their feelings compared to a waitlist control. The partner practice showed larger improvements — people got better at putting words to what they were feeling. The partner group was also more likely to drop out, with 25% leaving compared to 15% in the solo group (Silveira and colleagues, 2023).
Your body has a consistent map for each emotion. Researchers asked 701 participants to color on a body outline where they felt activity increasing and decreasing when given emotion words, stories, film clips, or faces. The patterns were distinct enough for each emotion that a computer could identify which emotion someone was feeling just from their coloring — well above chance. The maps were consistent across Finnish, Swedish, and Taiwanese participants (Nummenmaa and colleagues, 2014).
The Limits
Emotional awareness makes you more sensitive to the support around you — and that can help or hurt. Researchers followed 460 women with breast cancer over one year. Women with higher emotional awareness and low social support had greater depression and lower optimism. Higher awareness predicted greater depression at baseline, but lower depression at nine-month follow-up. The authors read this as awareness increasing sensitivity to whatever support is available — when support is low, that sensitivity makes things worse (Goldman and colleagues, 2025).
Stress makes it harder to tell your feelings apart. Researchers tracked 200 first-year students at three time points over a year, measuring their daily stress and their ability to distinguish between different negative emotions. Stress on one day predicted lower ability to tell negative emotions apart the next day, even after accounting for that day’s own stress levels. The effect was specific to stress — anger, anxiety, sadness, depression, and loneliness all correlated with differentiation on the same day, but none predicted it forward the way stress did (Erbas and colleagues, 2018).
How aware people say they are of their emotions and how well they can actually describe them are only weakly related. Researchers combined 28 samples covering 2,857 people, comparing two measures. The first (TAS-20) is a questionnaire asking people to rate statements like “I am often confused about what emotion I am feeling” — it measures how aware people believe they are. The second (LEAS) asks people to write responses to emotional scenarios, which trained raters then score for how many distinct emotions they identify and how specifically they describe them — it measures verbal fluency about emotions. The two showed only a weak relationship. The authors concluded they measure different aspects of emotional functioning, not the same thing (Maroti and colleagues, 2018).