Differentiating emotions reduces negative affect: Evidence from a new experimental paradigm

Negative emotion differentiation, the tendency to represent negative emotional experiences with specificity, is associated with more adaptive emotional functioning. Although typically operationalized as an individual difference, negative emotion differentiation can also be conceptualized as a momentary process of structuring affective experience. Distinguishing among semantically related negative emotions requires selectively endorsing some emotion categories while inhibiting others, thereby increasing conceptual precision and constraining affective interpretations. If emotional intensity is shaped in part by how affective states are represented, experimentally engaging differentiation may alter ongoing negative affect. Using a novel within-subjects experimental paradigm, across three studies we investigated whether differentiating emotions influences negative affect in response to brief video clips. Across two studies (Experiment 1, n = 79 undergraduates, and Experiment 2, n = 106 community adults, collected in 2024), there was a large effect of differentiating emotions (vs. "look" control) on negative affect (Cohen's ds = -0.698, -0.852). Although this effect did not replicate in a shorter version of the task (Experiment 3, n = 52 undergraduates), an internal meta-analysis across all three experiments revealed a significant overall effect, indicating that engaging in differentiation reliably attenuated negative affect on average. Although the comparison condition does not isolate differentiation from all forms of regulatory engagement, the results are consistent with the possibility that increasing representational specificity may function as an implicitly regulatory process, although primarily White and female samples limit generalizability. This open-source paradigm facilitates further research to elucidate the process of differentiating emotions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).