Research paper · RP07

Emotional Granularity as a Trainable Skill

Emotional granularity is the skill of putting a feeling into a precise word rather than a blunt one. Two eligible randomised trials of vocabulary-based programmes in non-clinical adults were identified between 2010 and 2026; a quantitative meta-analysis was therefore not possible and this paper reports a PRISMA-2020 systematic review with narrative synthesis. The first trial (n = 120) taught twelve emotion concepts over five days of about fifteen minutes each and found a reliable rise in negative-emotion differentiation against a geography control, still visible at one month; positive-emotion differentiation did not move. The second trial (n = 118 analysed) used a two-day online word-learning task and found no direct group effect on negative-emotion differentiation, self-efficacy, or later distress; only participants who wrote highly specific personal memories showed a path from learning to differentiation to lower one-week distress. Adjacent evidence — mindfulness programmes, intensive experience sampling, and brief laboratory labelling tasks — suggests the skill can shift, but those designs did not isolate vocabulary training. Transfer to distress and regulation therefore remains unproven in a pooled estimate. No eligible Indian trial was found. For an Indian workplace programme the honest product claim is modest: a short, digital vocabulary practice can raise the resolution of unpleasant feeling-words in some adults; it is not yet a proven lever for burnout scores. Certainty is low (GRADE). The field needs larger, pre-registered, multi-language trials with a differentiation index and a distress endpoint, including Hindi and other Indian languages.