Links Between Emotion Word, Usage, Understanding, Accuracy, and Emotion Dysregulation: An Integrative Analysis

People vary in the precision with which they experience and report on their emotions, known as emotional granularity, and this precision predicts their ability to regulate their emotions. It is not yet known, however, whether links between emotional granularity and emotion regulation are due to variation in knowledge of emotion words-specifically, individuals' reported usage, understanding, and ability to accurately define emotion words. In the present report, we combined data from six studies to address this gap in the literature using an integrative data analysis. Participants across the studies reported on how often they used and how well they understood a list of precise emotion words, and were tested on whether they could correctly pick a definition for each. They also completed questionnaire measures of self-reported emotional granularity (differentiation) and emotion dysregulation. Emotion word accuracy and understanding were highly correlated, so individual models were tested each separately to predict emotion dysregulation. In the model including usage and understanding, we observed a main effect of understanding, such that participants with greater self-reported understanding of emotion words reported less difficulty regulating their emotions. Similar effects were found for the model including usage and accuracy, such that individuals with higher emotion word accuracy had less difficulty regulating their emotions. Critically, these findings held when accounting for self-reported granularity (differentiation), suggesting that measures of emotion word knowledge have value for predicting emotion regulatory outcomes. Future work should examine whether individuals' emotion word knowledge is also linked to mental health outcomes.