School of Psychology, The University of Newcastle.
Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, KU Leuven.
Psychol Sci. 2019 Jun;30(6):863-879. doi: 10.1177/0956797619838763. Epub 2019 Apr 16.
Emotion differentiation, which involves experiencing and labeling emotions in a granular way, has been linked with well-being. It has been theorized that differentiating between emotions facilitates effective emotion regulation, but this link has yet to be comprehensively tested. In two experience-sampling studies, we examined how negative emotion differentiation was related to (a) the selection of emotion-regulation strategies and (b) the effectiveness of these strategies in downregulating negative emotion (s = 200 and 101 participants and 34,660 and 6,282 measurements, respectively). Unexpectedly, we found few relationships between differentiation and the selection of putatively adaptive or maladaptive strategies. Instead, we found interactions between differentiation and strategies in predicting negative emotion. Among low differentiators, all strategies (Study 1) and four of six strategies (Study 2) were more strongly associated with increased negative emotion than they were among high differentiators. This suggests that low differentiation may hinder successful emotion regulation, which in turn supports the idea that effective regulation may underlie differentiation benefits.
情绪区分，即细致地体验和标记情绪，与幸福感有关。理论认为，区分情绪有助于进行有效的情绪调节，但这一联系尚未得到全面检验。在两项经验抽样研究中，我们考察了消极情绪区分度与（a）情绪调节策略的选择以及（b）这些策略在抑制消极情绪方面的有效性之间的关系（参与者 s=200 和 101，测量值 s=34660 和 6282，分别）。出乎意料的是，我们发现区分度与适应性或不适应性策略的选择之间几乎没有关系。相反，我们发现区分度和策略之间的相互作用可以预测消极情绪。在低区分者中，所有策略（研究 1）和六个策略中的四个（研究 2）与增加的消极情绪的相关性都强于高区分者。这表明，低区分可能会阻碍成功的情绪调节，这反过来又支持了有效调节可能是区分优势的基础这一观点。
