Momentary Emotion Differentiation: The Derivation and Validation of an index to Study Within-Person Fluctuations in Emotion Differentiation

Abstract

Emotion differentiation refers to the tendency to label emotions in a granular way. While differentiation is an important individual difference in the context of psychological well-being, it is unknown how it fluctuates within individuals. Such a within-person measure is important, since it would allow the study of how changes in differentiation predict subsequent levels of other variables of interest. Here, we present a framework to study emotion differentiation at the within-person level by introducing a momentary emotion differentiation index. This index is directly derived from the classical emotion differentiation index, the intraclass correlation. We first give a theoretical derivation of this index. Next, using data from two experience sampling studies, we show how this new momentary index is related to other momentary indicators of well-being, and take the first steps in building its nomological network. A better understanding of within-person fluctuations in emotion differentiation will allow us to identify the causes and consequences of these fluctuations, and search for ways to teach individuals to increase their level of emotion differentiation.

Emotion Differentiation and Youth Mental Health: Current Understanding and Open Questions

“…Positive and negative emotion differentiation are computed separately so that each score can represent how specifically people identify emotions within a class of emotions that share a similar valence, though some research has investigated overall differentiation using an ICC across both positive and negative emotions (e.g., Kimhy et al, 2014). Researchers have also recently developed methods to quantify how specifically people differentiate emotions at the moment-level, not just at the person-level (Tomko et al, 2015;Erbas et al, 2018Erbas et al, , 2021. These studies offer compelling evidence that emotion differentiation varies within individuals and that these oscillations share interesting relationships with outcomes.…”

“…Third, "situation-level factors" shape how we should interpret emotion differentiation measures. For example, momentary levels of stress influence emotion differentiation scores (Erbas et al, 2018(Erbas et al, , 2021. Similarly, one would imagine that the literal situations in which one measures participants' emotional responses would affect emotion differentiation scores and how well they predict psychopathology (e.g., people who avoid fear-inducing situations during sampling periods may never have the opportunity to endorse feeling fear, even though measuring differentiation in these settings might be the most powerful assay of symptom levels).…”

Is Negative Emotion Differentiation Associated With Emotion Regulation Choice? Investigations at the Person and Day Level

“…For the empirical investigation of ED at the state level, different analytic approaches have been developed. Derived from the person-level ED ICC, Erbas et al (2021) introduce a momentary ED index, concerning fluctuations in ED relative to the person's overall level of ED. In addition, Grossmann et al (2016a,b) have quantified state ED as a combined index of the number of experienced emotions (richness) and the relative intensity of each of the emotions (evenness).…”

Negative Emotion Differentiation Attenuates the Within-Person Indirect Effect of Daily Stress on Nightly Sleep Quality Through Calmness

“…Making use of a recently proposed framework to study momentary emotion differentiation at the level of measurement occasions ( Erbas et al, 2021 ), we additionally set out to explore within-person (i.e., in our case, daily) fluctuations in NED. More specifically, we calculated Erbas et al’s (2021) novel momentary index of NED and analyzed whether the stress buffering effect of person-level NED translates to day-level NED (i.e., whether stress reactivity would be lower on days on which an individual’s NED is higher than usual).…”

“…Making use of a recently proposed framework to study momentary emotion differentiation at the level of measurement occasions ( Erbas et al, 2021 ), we additionally set out to explore within-person (i.e., in our case, daily) fluctuations in NED. More specifically, we calculated Erbas et al’s (2021) novel momentary index of NED and analyzed whether the stress buffering effect of person-level NED translates to day-level NED (i.e., whether stress reactivity would be lower on days on which an individual’s NED is higher than usual). Moreover, as a first step toward elucidating a potential mechanism through which NED might exert a stress-buffering function, we additionally explored whether rumination about emotions would enhance negative responses to daily stress (i.e., whether daily rumination would act as a Level 1 moderator of the within-person link between daily stress and calmness in the evening) and whether lower daily NED would be associated with more daily rumination about emotions.…”