Emodiversity and the Emotional Ecosystem This Article Has Been Corrected. See Last Page

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 5 main dimensions of personality. Emodiversity is a practically important and previously unidentified metric for assessing the health of the human emotional ecosystem. Compare three individuals: Person A experiences three moments of joy in a given day, Person B experiences two moments of joy and one moment of contentment, and Person C experiences two moments of joy and one moment of anxiety. If we sum the number of positive emotions (joy and contentment) and subtract the number of negative emotions (anxiety), A and B would be equally happy, and happier than C. Indeed, decades of research on negative and positive affectivity has suggested that high levels of positive emotion and low levels of negative emotion are an essential component of health and subjective well-being (DeNeve & result of such simple arithmetic subtractions? We investigate whether not just the mean levels but also the diversity of emotions that people experience may have benefits for their well-being. We show that the emodiversity of A, B, and C's emotions—the variety and relative abundance of the emotions they experience—is an independent and integral component of the human emotional ecosystem that predicts both mental and physical health. Our notion of emodiversity builds on a large body of research highlighting the benefits of having a rich, authentic, and complex emotional life (Barrett, 2009, 2013; Barrett & Bliss-Moreau, 2009). Along with people's explicit knowledge of their own emotions (i.e., emotional awareness; Lane & Schwartz, 1987), the richness and complexity in people's self-reported experience of emotion is a primary aspect of the broad concept of emotional complexity (e.g., Lindquist & Barrett, 2008), which has been linked to adaptive emotion regulation and mental health in adult-While such complexity has been operationalized a variety of ways, these measures of complexity may be grouped into two broad categories: measures of emotional granularity and measures of emotional covariation. Emotional granularity is the degree to which a person can verbally characterize …

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