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Most of the time, the feeling of guilt is also accompanied with anger. While at times it may be clear to the people who feel it as to what exactly they are feeling, it is often difficult for many people to differentiate between feelings of anger or guilt. Even harder is to distinguish between anger and frustration.

In a new study, due to be published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, psychological scientist Emre Demiralp of the University of Michigan and his colleagues, studied how well clinically depressed people can discriminate between different types of negative emotions compared to healthy individuals.

When a person has clinical depression, he/she often feels sadness, anger, fear or frustration that interferes with their everyday life.

"It is difficult to improve your life without knowing whether you are sad or angry about some aspect of it," says Demiralp. "For example, imagine not having a gauge independently indicating the gasoline level of your car. It would be challenging to know when to stop for gas. We wanted to investigate whether people with clinical depression had emotional gauges that were informative and whether they experienced emotions with the same level of specificity and differentiation as healthy people."

For the study, there were 106 participants, aged between 18 and 40, half of whom were diagnosed with clinical depression and half were not.

The researchers, in a span of 7-8 days, recorded the emotions of the participants at 56 random times of the day in what they call a Palm Pilot. To report their emotions, they marked the degree to which they felt seven negative emotions (sad, anxious, angry, frustrated, ashamed, disgusted and guilty) and four positive emotions (happy, excited, alert and active) on a scale from one to four, Medical Xpress reported.

The researchers, for the study looked at participants' tendency to give multiple emotions (e.g., disgusted and frustrated) similar rankings at a given point in time. According to the researchers, the more a participant tended to give multiple emotions, the lesser they were able to differentiate between these emotions.

The findings of the study revealed that clinically depressed people were less able to differentiate between negative emotions compared to the healthy people.

However, these findings did not stand the same for positive emotions. It was found that people with and without clinical depression were equally able to differentiate between positive emotions.

According to the report, it is possible that people with clinical depression can better differentiate between positive emotions as a coping mechanism.

The researchers say that the findings of the study may be helpful in studying the emotional experience of clinically depressed people, leading to improved treatment and therapy options in the future.

"Our results suggest that being specific about your negative emotions might be good for you", says Demiralp. "It might be best to avoid thinking that you are feeling generally bad or unpleasant. Be specific. Is it anger, shame, guilt or some other emotion? This can help you circumvent it and improve your life. It is one of our overarching goals to investigate approaches for facilitating this kind of emotional intelligence at a large scale in the population."