New findings published in Clinical Psychological Science indicate that adolescents who are better at differentiating their emotions are less likely to develop mental health symptoms as a response to stress. These findings were discovered via an intensive longitudinal study, and it was prompted due to the fact that it is widely documented that stress exposure during adolescence can lead to psychological issues. Of course, not everyone develops psychological issues as a response to stress, so researchers decided to now look for factors that prevent this outcome for certain adolescents.
Researchers Erik C. Nook and his team were hoping to replicate and extend previous findings that emotional regulation can be a protective factor. The study authors wanted to test if the ability to accurately identify your emotions would ease the impact of stress on adolescents, due to the fact that it is a key aspect of emotional regulation. This particular skill, which can be referred to as emotional differentiation, tends to be low during adolescent years.
To analyze the relation between emotion differentiation, stress, and internalizing symptoms, the researchers decided to conduct a longitudinal study that examined a group of adolescents over the span of one year. Thirty students between the ages of fifteen and seventeen participated in a task to test their emotional differentiation. The participants were given a series of positive and negative images and were requested to rate their emotional responses to each image.
The participants attended a monthly lab interview for twelve months. They were assessed on levels of anxiety, depression, and their exposure to stressful life incidents. They were also asked to complete moment-level assessments of their feelings during four three week periods throughout the year. They were also reminded via their smartphones to complete a brief questionnaire three times a day that assessed their levels of anxiety, depression, and stress.
The analysis of the data provided revealed that the participants’ moment-level perception of stress were associated with the depressed affect. Basically, when the students felt higher levels of stress than normal, they also felt higher levels of depression. However, the link between perceived stress and depressed mood was actually weaker for the participants with higher negative and higher positive emotion differentiation scores. These findings suggest that those for who were able to identify their emotions at a higher level, stress and depression were linked strongly. The association of anxious feelings and depressed feelings was weaker among students with greater negative and greater positive emotion differentiation.
For the monthly assessments, those who were experiencing more stressful life events had reported increased symptoms of anxiety. However, the link was no longer existent for the participants with a higher level of negative emotion differentiation. These discoveries support the idea that emotional regulation can help ease the impact of stress in causing psychological issues.
Nook and his team state that having a broad understanding of different types of emotions helps individuals to efficiently specify their emotions. This includes knowing what caused the feeling, as well as the best way to address it.
More research must be done in order to understand why emotional regulation is helpful. The current prevailing hypothesis is that being able to differentiate emotions might improve how humans manage their feelings. However, it is important to note that more studies must be conducted to verify that the information is accurate.
Researchers say their findings point out that emotional differentiation could be a huge asset to target during interviews with at-risk youth. The benefit of the study’s intensity is that it provided thousands of observations. The researchers clarify that future studies should be conducted among larger samples to improve the impact of the findings.
**The study, “High Emotion Differentiation Buffers Against Internalizing Symptoms Following Exposure to Stressful Life Events in Adolescence: An Intensive Longitudinal Study”, was authored by Erik C. Nook, John C. Flournoy, Alexandra M. Rodman, Patrick Mair, and Katie A. McLaughlin.