Is Negative Emotion Differentiation Associated With Emotion Regulation Choice? Investigations at the Person and Day Level

The association between negative emotion differentiation and emotion regulation flexibility in daily life

Emotion differentiation emphasises labelling emotional experiences in a precise and context-sensitive way. Negative emotion differentiation (NED) has been found to be associated with mental health, where emotion regulation (ER) may act as a pathway. The current study aims to explore the association between NED and flexible ER implementation in daily life. Specifically, we examined how NED was associated with two aspects of ER flexibility: contextual synchrony and temporal ER variability. 101 college students (54% female; Mage = 20.24 years) reported their momentary emotions via a 7-day experience sampling protocol, and the intraclass correlation coefficients were calculated to reflect NED. In 10-day daily diaries, they also reported information about the most negative event during the day (i.e. event type, event intensity and ER goal) and how they regulated their emotions. The results revealed that individuals with high NED showed higher levels of synchrony between change in ER use and change in event type and ER goal. In addition, NED was positively associated with both within- and between-strategy variability in ER use. The results demonstrated that the ability to differentiate between negative emotions was related to higher ER flexibility, which shed new light on understanding the role of emotion differentiation in well-being.

Bodies in action: Do contractive and expansive postures facilitate adaptive behavior?

The present study investigated the effects of expansive and contractive body displays on adaptive behavior and affective outcomes. Addressing limitations in past research, the effects were investigated in two different contexts (i.e., fear context and sadness context), compared with two types of control conditions and the moderating effects of motivational traits and symptoms of psychopathology were accounted for. A sample of 186 adults completed a fear experiment involving a mock job interview and a sadness experiment involving sad mood induction. For each experiment, participants were randomly assigned to one of four body manipulations: (1) expansive; (2) contractive; (3) active control (i.e., running in place); or 4) passive control (i.e., doing nothing). The primary outcome was adaptive behavior (i.e., appropriate job-interview behavior and positive recall bias). Secondary affective outcomes were emotions, action tendencies, and appraisals. Results revealed small, non-significant effects of body displays on primary outcomes (ds = 0.19-0.28). For secondary outcomes, significant effects were identified for positive emotions (ds = 0.33). Across secondary outcomes, pairwise comparisons revealed that expansive displays led to more favorable outcomes than contractive displays. For participants with the highest levels of depression, body display conditions led to less favorable affective outcomes than control conditions. The results suggest that body displays do not influence adaptive behavior within the investigated contexts. When compared to contractive displays, expansive displays were found to yield more favorable affective changes. Lastly, the findings indicate that further investigations into body manipulations in the context of psychopathology are warranted.

How do "words poorly expressed emotion" affect mental health? The mediating role of affect labelling effect

Previous studies have found that people with high negative emotional granularity(NEG) tend to have better health levels. It is generally believed that this is due to the selection and application of explicit emotion regulation strategies that affect mental health. However, no research has yet examined a more fundamental process, the role of affect labelling, an implicit emotion regulation strategy. This study focuses on the aforementioned issues and uses the experience sampling method to categorise participants into groups with high and low NEG. Using an affect labelling paradigm with ERP(event-related potential) technology, the study measures the effects of affect labelling in participants. Furthermore, it assesses the mental health levels of the participants through questionnaires to explore whether the affect labelling effect serves as a mediator between NEG and mental health. The results show that: (1) The high-NEG group exhibited significantly lower LPP wave amplitudes under affect labelling compared to under non-affect labelling, whereas the low-NEG group did not show significant differences. The results indicate that only the high-NEG group can produce the affect labelling effect. (2) The affect labelling effect mediates the relationship between NEG and mental health, meaning that NEG predicts mental health through the affect labelling effect.

Examining the Role of Emotion Differentiation on Emotion and Cardiovascular Physiological Activity During Acute Stress

Emotion differentiation (ED) - the tendency to experience one's emotions with specificity - is a well-established predictor of adaptive responses to daily life stress. Yet, there is little research testing the role of ED in self-reported and physiological responses to an acute stressor. In the current study, we investigate the effects of negative emotion differentiation (NED) and positive emotion differentiation (PED) on participants' self-reported emotions and cardiac-mediated sympathetic nervous system reactivity (i.e., pre-ejection period) in response to a stressful task. Healthy young adults enrolled in a two-session study. At an initial session, participants completed a modified experience sampling procedure (i.e., the Day Reconstruction Method). At session 2, 195 completed the Trier Social Stress Test while cardiac impedance was acquired throughout. Linear regressions demonstrated that higher NED, but not PED, was associated with experiencing less intense self-reported negative, high arousal emotions (e.g., irritated, panicky) during the stressor (β =  - .15, p < .05) although people with higher NED also exhibited greater sympathetic reactivity (β = .16, p < .05). In exploratory analyses, we tested whether the effect of NED on self-reported stress was mediated by the tendency to make internally focus (or self-focused) attributions about performance on the task but did not find a significant indirect effect (p = .085). These results both complement prior work and provide a more complex picture of the role of NED in adaptive responses to stressful life events, suggesting that people with higher NED may experience their emotions as more manageable regardless of their level of physiological arousal.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42761-023-00189-y.

Emotion regulation patterns: Capturing variability and flexibility in emotion regulation in an experience sampling study

Variability and flexibility in emotion regulation (ER) are considered important ingredients in adaptive ER. Few attempts at operationalizing variability and flexibility in ER have been made. In two 10‐day experience sampling studies (N = 51 and 39), healthy participants rated their momentary emotions and their ER efforts in response to those emotions. We evaluated the association between ER (i.e., between and within ER strategy variability and ER flexibility, operationalized as putatively adaptive, putatively maladaptive and total strategies) and measures of well‐being (psychological distress, satisfaction with life) in general (person‐level) and in everyday life (day‐level). Higher within‐variability indicated that a strategy was used more at some occasions and less at others. Higher between‐variability indicated variation in the extent to which different strategies were engaged at the same time point. Overall, results were mixed, but in some instances, indicators of ER variability and ER flexibility were related to each other and measures of well‐being differently. Total within ER variability was negatively associated with well‐being at the person and day level. Putatively adaptive between and within ER variability were associated with less well‐being at the person level. At the day level, putatively adaptive and maladaptive between ER variability and maladaptive within ER variability were negatively associated with well‐being. Putatively adaptive ER flexibility was negatively associated with satisfaction with life. This study adds to the literature on indicators of variability and flexibility in ER and their potential adaptiveness. The results indicate that variability in ER could be a maladaptive property, but more research is needed to understand this in terms of putatively adaptive and maladaptive strategies. Future studies on the adaptiveness of these indicators should obtain more contextual information.