Emotion Differentiation Measuring Methods: Comparative Analysis

Emotion differentiation is a construct that expresses the fragmentation of a person’s emotional experience, in other words, how well a person distinguishes between his emotions. The importance of studying emotion differentiation is due to the fact that it is associated with emotion regulation and psychological well-being. Several methods for measuring emotion differentiation have been proposed, but it is not known how comparable their results are. The purpose of this work was to develop Russian-language versions of three methods for measuring emotional differentiation, adapt them and analyze the extent to which their results are comparable with each other. Two methods (SRT and PED-task) were laboratory, one was based on repeated measurements of emotional state over 10 days. Using these methods, data were collected on 107 participants aged 18 to 44 years (M=24.22; SD=6.35), of whom 85 were women and 22 were men. The reliability of all obtained indicators was satisfactory (from 0.50 to 0.78). Indicators of laboratory methods are positively related to each other, but practically do not correlate with indicators obtained using the method of repeated measurements. It is concluded that these two types of methods measure different aspects of emotional differentiation or even different constructs. A method based on multiple measurements seems to be more preferable, since it has higher ecological validity and also allows one to obtain rich additional information about the general emotional background and the variability and dynamics of emotional states.