Emotion differentiation (ED) has been defined in terms of two abilities: (a) making fine-grained distinctions between emotional experiences, and (b) describing individual emotional experiences with a high degree of nuance and specificity. Research to date has almost exclusively focused on the former, with little attention paid to the latter. The current study sought to address this discrepant focus by testing two novel measures of negative ED (i.e., based on negatively valenced emotions only) via coded open-ended descriptions of individual emotional experiences, both past and present. As part of a larger study, 307 participants completed written descriptions of two negative emotional experiences, as well as a measure of emotion regulation difficulties and indices of psychopathological symptom severity. Negative ED ability, as measured via consistency between emotional experiences, was found to be unrelated to negative ED ability exhibited via coding of language within experiences. Within-experience negative ED may offer an incrementally adaptive function to that of ED between emotional experiences. Implications for ED theory are discussed.

情绪分化（ED）被定义为两种能力：（a）在情绪体验之间做出细粒度的区分，以及（b）描述个体具有高度细微差别和特异性的情感体验。迄今为止的研究几乎完全集中在前者，很少关注后者。目前的研究试图通过对过去和现在的个人情绪体验的编码开放式描述来测试两种新的负面 ED 测量方法（即仅基于负面情绪）来解决这种不一致的焦点。作为一项大型研究的一部分，307 名参与者完成了对两种负面情绪体验的书面描述，以及情绪调节困难和精神病理学症状严重程度指数的测量。通过情感体验之间的一致性来衡量的消极 ED 能力被发现与通过体验中的语言编码表现出的消极 ED 能力无关。体验内负性 ED 可能在情感体验之间为 ED 提供增量适应功能。讨论了对 ED 理论的影响。