Examining the association among adolescents’ emotional clarity, emotion differentiation, and the regulation of negative and positive affect using a daily diary approach.

= 12.99 years) completed a 28-day diary (> 3,500 entries in total) reporting daily affect, emotional clarity, and the use of five emotion regulation strategies in response to negative and positive affect (i.e., rumination, dampening, behavioral avoidance, negative and positive suppression). As predicted, on both between- and within-person levels, higher emotional clarity was associated with decreased use of all maladaptive emotion regulation strategies after adjusting for mean affect intensity. Results for emotion differentiation were mostly nonsignificant. Only higher daily positive emotion differentiation was associated with decreased rumination. In sum, this innovative study explores multiple aspects of emotional knowledge usage and regulation during a critical developmental stage and emphasizes the role of emotional clarity in the regulation of negative and positive affect. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).