Emotion differentiation: the meta skill

The ability to label your emotions is a superpower, according to research. Do you have it?

Nov 15, 2023

This is how to tell if you have the one very specific ability that's been linked to lower levels of depression, social anxiety, eating disorders, and even alcohol consumption, aggression and emotional pain after being rejected.

Emotion differentiation

Emotion differentiation is the ability to label your internal experience with specificity and to distinguish the nuances of your emotions instead of just having a general sense of how you feel.

It’s the difference between feeling "bad" and feeling disappointed, annoyed, resentful, indignant or frustrated.

Additionally, people with a high degree of emotion differentiation pay attention not just to the type of emotion they're experiencing but also to its intensity and frequency: "I feel angry" vs. "I feel extremely angry" or "I feel mildly angry".

How does emotion differentiation work?

If we lack emotional awareness and granularity, we'll find it harder to deal with challenging situations. We may become overwhelmed or entangled in our feelings. Or we might start having emotions about our emotions – like feeling anxious or shameful about the experience of anxiety – which is one hell of a vicious cycle.

Improving your emotion differentiation, on the other hand, can put you back in the driver's seat. In order to perceive an emotion, we receive information from the outside world and from our bodies, then we categorise and label the experience, which informs our response to it. Therefore, the more specific the label, the more information we actually have, and the better we'll be able to regulate the emotion.

In one study, people with high negative emotion differentiation were found to be less likely to use distraction and avoidance as coping mechanisms - and one hypothesis for why this happens is that labeling your emotions gives you a sense of control, making you less likely to try and escape them.

Emotion differentiation also allows you to distance yourself rather than let emotions dominate your attention. You can move on and focus on your goals, rather than get stuck trying to deal with your feelings first.

How to improve your emotion differentiation

So how can you improve your emotion differentiation? The same way you'd expand your vocabulary about anything else, really. I recommend visiting the Emotion Typology website, which contains nuanced descriptions of different emotions, or getting hold of an Emotion Wheel, and saving it on your phone, perhaps as a screen saver so it serves as a reminder. And finally, make time to improve your general self-awareness. Research shows that only about 10-15% of us are actually self-aware and commitment to practice is what separates those who are from those only think they are.

Thank you for reading!

We’re Hazel (ex boxer, therapist and author) and Ellie (ex psychology science writer). We left our jobs to build an interactive narrative app for self-awareness and emotion regulation (Betwixt), which you can try on Android here and on iOS here.