Abstract
Labeling emotions with a high degree of granularity appears to be beneficial for well-being. However, there are individual differences in the level of emotion differentiation, and some individuals do not appear to differentiate much between different emotions. Low differentiation is associated with maladaptive outcomes, therefore such individuals might benefit from interventions that can increase their level of emotion differentiation. To this end, we tested the effects of an emotion knowledge intervention on the level of emotion differentiation. One hundred and twenty participants were assigned to either an experimental or a control condition. Emotion differentiation was assessed with a Scenario Rating Task before and after the intervention, and at follow-up. As predicted, negative emotion differentiation increased significantly after the emotion knowledge intervention, and this increase was not observed in the control group. Positive emotion differentiation also increased slightly; however, it did not reach significance level. This finding suggests that an emotion knowledge intervention might be beneficial for increasing negative emotion differentiation and may have implications for the clinical context.
Highlights
We hypothesized that increasing individuals’ emotion knowledge would help them to better differentiate between emotions and found that the individuals who received the emotion knowledge intervention improved their levels of emotion differentiation
We found that the emotion knowledge intervention benefited emotion differentiation on both the within- and between-person level
Compared to the control group, we found that the level of negative emotion differentiation had increased significantly from baseline to post-intervention
Summary
Higher differentiation appeared to be beneficial in relationships with others: it was related to more empathic accuracy (Erbas et al, 2016) and better recognition of others’ emotional expressions (Israelashvili et al, 2019) Together, these studies suggest that high levels of emotion differentiation have important implications for well-being. These studies suggest that emotion knowledge may be important and beneficial for well-being because it can positively influence how individuals experience emotions and adaptively apply their emotion-related abilities In line with this past research, it has been theorized that this conceptual information on emotions and their components is constitutive and would end up making multimodal emotional instances more distinctive by adding complexity to their features (Barrett et al, 2001). We examined whether intervention effects were still present at T3
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