Experimental study demonstrates that differentiating emotions reduces negative affect in undergraduates, indicating that representational specificity functions as an implicit regulatory process.
= 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).
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Carolus et al. (2026) studied this question.
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