Advancing age can bring a decline in many driving-related cognitive abilities. For this reason, public safety concern has raised about older adults’ driving performance, and many countries have adopted screening polices to assess older drivers’ fitness to drive. As a result of such assessments, authorities may impose behavioral restrictions to driving. The present study examines whether driving-related cognitive abilities change over time and compares drivers either restricted or not by licensing authorities after the first assessment. The data were derived from a database provided by a service of psychodiagnostic assessment of fitness to drive. This database contained data of people referred for cognitive assessment in order to renew their driving license over the period of 2016 to 2022. The sample included 58 cognitively healthy old drivers (mean age = 82.79, SD = 6.13; 97% men) with a follow-up examination (T2) after a period ranging from one to four years (M = 1.59, SD = 0.72) since the first assessment. Cognitive assessments were conducted using the standard test battery from the Vienna Test System (VTS8; ©Schuhfried GmbH, Mödling, Austria). Decision time variability, motor time, reaction time under stress, and obtaining an overview did not show significant changes between T1 and T2, whereas selective attention and inductive reasoning significantly decreased over time in both groups. Improvements in processing speed consistent with practice effects emerged at T2. Restricted drivers (n = 41) maintained significantly worse performances than unrestricted drivers (n = 17) in the follow-up assessment. Chronological age was associated with higher reaction time under stress, while education showed a buffering role against a decrease in perceptual speed. Overall, although older drivers’ driving-related cognitive abilities remain relatively stable over the short-term, the decline in some cognitive functions deserves reevaluation and monitoring.

Emotional granularity, or the ability to make fine-grained distinctions among emotional states, has been linked to adaptive psychological functioning. However, summary measures of granularity quantify the extent to which individuals differentiate emotions without revealing how they organize emotion concepts. The present study employed a network-analytic approach applied to self-generated affective labels to explore how affective space is structured in individuals with high and low granularity. Given that affective space is organized around both mental and somatic representations, we focused on chronic pain as a prototypical context where these dimensions are especially intertwined. Seventy-one participants experiencing chronic pain completed a one-month event-contingent experience sampling protocol, reporting on their affective experience during pain episodes using both fixed negative emotion labels and self-generated descriptors. Dispositional negative emotional granularity was indexed via intraclass correlation and used to classify participants into high- and low-granularity groups. For each group, between-person graphical emotion networks were constructed based on participants’ self-generated affective labels. Results revealed a sparser and more semantically coherent network in the high-granularity group, with differentiated and meaningfully organized clusters. By contrast, the low-granularity group generated a larger and denser affective network, with more heterogeneous affective communities and uncertainty- and need-related terms as central hubs. Despite these differences, both groups produced affective labels spanning emotional, cognitive, bodily, and relational domains, and shared a substantial subset of affective descriptors. Although exploratory and descriptive in nature, these findings offer a novel characterization of how granularity is reflected in the structural organization of affective space. Implications for adaptive psychological functioning, particularly in the chronic pain context, and granularity measurement are discussed.

Background: Emotion differentiation (ED) is the ability to represent emotional experiences with nuance and specificity. Because it is defined as an ability, ED requires performance-based measures, which makes its assessment particularly challenging and has led to highly heterogeneous operationalizations across the literature.Objective: The present systematic review has three main objectives. First, it systematically maps how performance-based ED has been conceptualized and operationalized across literature. Second, it identifies the main methodological concerns associated with current operationalizations. Finally, it derives recommendations for transparent reporting and a research agenda to strengthen the ED measurement.Methods: Following a preregistered protocol, we searched Scopus, PsycInfo, PubMed, and Web of Science from inception to January 2025. Three reviewers independently screened records and extracted data. Peer-reviewed empirical studies of non-clinical adult samples were included.Results: Ninety-six articles (115 studies) met the inclusion criteria. The results showed high variability in ED conceptualizations and operationalizations within and across three main methodological dimensions: Measurement approach (ecological vs. nonecological), emotion vocabulary (predefined labels vs. natural language), and computational procedures to derive ED indices. Key methodological choices were frequently unreported.Conclusions: Heterogeneity across methodological dimensions raises distinct concerns for the validity, reliability, replicability, generalizability, and cross-study comparability of ED measures. Critically, this heterogeneity reflects not only methodological variation but also different assumptions about what counts as evidence of the ability to differentiate emotions. Research requires aligning the theoretical meaning of ED, the information collected, and the assumptions used to derive scores. We propose reporting guidelines and future directions for refining the assessment of ED.