Paying attention to your emotions only helps if you can make sense of them

We are often told that being in touch with our feelings is good for us. A large Spanish study complicates that advice. It finds that paying close attention to your emotions tends to help only when you can also make sense of those emotions and do something about them.

Raquel Gómez-Leal, Pablo Fernández-Berrocal and Alberto Megías-Robles surveyed 2,578 Spanish adults using a well-established questionnaire that separates three emotional skills, namely how much attention people pay to their feelings, how clearly they can identify them, and how well they can recover from negative emotional states. Participants also reported symptoms of anxiety and depression over the previous month.

Rather than relating each skill to mental health on its own, the team used cluster analysis to group people into naturally occurring emotional profiles. Four emerged: people high on all three skills, people low on all three, people high on attention but only moderate on clarity and repair, and people low on attention with similarly moderate clarity and repair.

The results were clear. People strong on all three skills reported the best mental health, as expected. But the group who paid a great deal of attention to their feelings, without matching clarity and the ability to recover, reported significantly worse mental health than the group who paid little attention. The authors read this as evidence that attention on its own is not protective, and that closely monitoring your emotional life can feed rumination and distress when you lack the skills to interpret and regulate what you notice.

The researchers suggest this helps explain years of mixed findings, in which some studies found emotional attentiveness helpful and others found it harmful. The missing ingredient was context. Attentiveness paired with clarity and repair was consistently associated with better mental health, whereas attentiveness on its own was not.

There was also a gender difference. Women scored higher on emotional attention but reported somewhat poorer mental health than men, in line with broader patterns in the anxiety and depression literature, though the study cannot say why.

The clinical implication is reasonably direct. Rather than encouraging everyone simply to check in with their feelings, mental health support may work better when it also builds the skills to interpret and manage those feelings once they surface. As the authors put it, high emotional awareness is not healthy in itself; its value depends on what accompanies it.

Two cautions apply. The study is a single snapshot and relies on self-report, so it cannot establish cause and effect. It is also worth noting that the two groups being compared were not identical on the other skills. Both sat around average on clarity and repair, but the high-attention group scored somewhat lower on the ability to recover from negative states, which may itself contribute to their poorer mental health. Tracking these profiles over time would help show whether moving from an attention-heavy profile to a more balanced one actually improves outcomes.

Gómez-Leal, R., Fernández-Berrocal, P., & Megías-Robles, A. (2026). When feeling too much hurts: Emotional intelligence profiles and their implications for mental health. Personality and Individual Differences, 262, Article 113936. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2026.113936