Emotion Differentiation as Resilience Against Excessive Alcohol Use

Abstract

Some people are adept at using discrete emotion categories (anxious, angry, sad) to capture their felt experience; other people merely communicate how good or bad they feel. We theorized that people who are better at describing their emotions might be less likely to self-medicate with alcohol. During a 3-week period, 106 underage social drinkers used handheld computers to self-monitor alcohol intake. From participants' reported experiences during random prompts, we created an individual difference measure of emotion differentiation. Results from a 30-day timeline follow-back revealed that people with intense negative emotions consumed less alcohol if they were better at describing emotions and less reliant on global descriptions. Results from ecological momentary assessment procedures revealed that people with intense negative emotions prior to drinking episodes consumed less alcohol if they were better at describing emotions. These findings provide support for a novel methodology and dimension for understanding the influence of emotions on substance-use patterns.

Differentiating emotions across contexts: Comparing adults with and without social anxiety disorder using random, social interaction, and daily experience sampling.

“…Specifically, current treatment methods fail to help people with SAD achieve levels of functioning comparable to healthy adults and improvements in well-being often fail to maintain long-term (e.g., Eng, Coles, Heimberg, & Safren, 2001). Our study suggests that training people to be better at identifying and discriminating among negative emotions may be an important adjunct to existing therapeutic approaches, as this skill may lead to improvements in reacting to and repairing negative mood states (Kashdan et al, 2010; Zaki et al, in press). Mindfulness training has particular potential, as recent evidence suggests that greater mindfulness predicts better emotion differentiation and less difficulty using healthy emotion regulation strategies (Hill & Updegraff, 2012).…”

“…We computed indices of positive and negative emotion differentiation by calculating the average intraclass correlations (ICCs) with absolute agreement between the positive and negative adjectives, respectively, across all assessment points for each participant (see Kashdan et al, 2010; Tugade et al, 2004). Larger ICCs indicate greater relation between emotion categories (i.e., lower level of emotion differentiation), while lower ICCs indicate less relation between emotion categories (i.e., higher degree of emotion differentiation).…”

“…Emotion differentiation , also referred to as emotional granularity, is the degree to which a person is able to classify felt experiences into discrete emotion categories (Barrett, Gross, Christensen, & Benvenuto, 2001; Tugade, Fredrickson, & Barrett, 2004). People vary in their ability to differentiate positive (Tugade et al, 2004) and negative emotions (e.g., Barrett, 2004; Kashdan, Ferssizidis, Collins, & Muraven, 2010). People low in emotion differentiation are less attentive to and less able to describe how they feel at any given time; thus, their descriptions of emotional states tend to be limited to broader, non-specific terms such as “good” for people low in positive emotion differentiation or “bad” for people low in negative emotion differentiation.…”

A Preliminary Examination of the Role of Emotion Differentiation in the Relationship Between Borderline Personality and Urges for Maladaptive Behaviors

“…For instance, the ability to distinguish between positive emotions has been shown to predict less avoidant or impulsive coping in response to stress (Tugade, Fredrickson, and Barrett 2004). Furthermore, in a study of social drinkers, among those with intense negative emotions, higher levels of emotion differentiation in daily life predicted less alcohol consumption (Kashdan, Ferssizidis, Collins, and Muraven 2010). To date, however, only one study has examined the association between emotion differentiation and maladaptive behaviors in the context of BP pathology.…”

A Smartphone App to Assess Alcohol Consumption Behavior: Development, Compliance, and Reactivity (Preprint)

“…Early studies typically featured hand-held electronic devices [6,7] or interactive voice response systems [8,9]. In the case of the former, participants used the device as an electronic diary; in the later, the interactive voice response system was programmed to call participants on researcher-supplied cellular phones multiple times per day so an automated questionnaire could be administered.…”