Gaining Clarity About Emotion Differentiation

Emotion differentiation captures the detail with which people describe their emotional experiences. A compelling body of research has linked low and negative emotion differentiation to a host of adverse psychological outcomes, yet conceptual and methodological questions and issues remain. We think that the time is right to review and reflect on this growing literature to gain clarity that can be applied to future research. We first review assessment of emotion differentiation while highlighting the methodological variation across studies. Then supported by the literature review, we discuss disconnections between the conceptualization and measurement of differentiation. Finally, to motivate future research, we propose factors that we hypothesize are associated with potentially beneficial effects of emotion differentiation in a given situation (i.e., related to state emotion differentiation) and more generally across time (i.e., related to trait emotion differentiation).