Do I experience happiness in the same way as you do? A relational approach to characterize emotional experience

Do people experience emotions in the same way? How can we characterize the sameness of emotional quality? Qualitative aspects of emotional experience are usually communicated through words. However, words can be ambiguous and can mean different things to different people. Here, we introduce a relational approach that characterizes emotional experiences as structure based on similarity judgments among emotion-evoking videos. This registered report will apply this method to characterize a psychological condition of “alexithymia”, which is described as “no words for emotions”. Do people with alexithymia experience the same emotions with altered expressivity? Or do they not experience them to begin with? Our structural approach will determine if individuals with high and low alexithymia have the same emotional experiences. Our findings will open the door to the study of emotional experiences by offering a relational approach that bypasses verbal reports and will help to clarify the nature of alexithymia.