AbstractsPsychology

The act of labeling and differentiating emotional experiences is associated with both adaptive functioning under stress and psychological well-being, and likely relies on higher order elaborative processing. The experience of anxiety in response to real or perceived threat is thought to reduce this type of processing, instead placing emphasis on more automatic encoding in order to prepare the individual to respond appropriately to the aforementioned threat. We hypothesized that individuals higher in trait anxiety, who are characterized as having a bias toward threat and difficulty disengaging from it once detected, would therefore have difficulty differentiating their affective experiences. We recruited 222 college students and had them complete both self-report measures of trait anxiety and depression symptoms, followed by an emotion modulation task made up of six emotionally evocative videos during which participants indicated how they were feeling by rating affect terms at the end of each clip. We calculated within-person average inter-item correlations (AICs) between affect terms to assess differentiation of both negative and positive affect across the task. As hypothesized, individuals higher in trait anxiety had lower levels of negative (but not positive) affect differentiation, even after controlling for age, gender, undergraduate status, and depression symptoms. Our results suggest that those who are higher in trait anxiety have more trouble differentiating their negative affective experiences from one another. In turn, these individuals may not reap the aforementioned benefits associated with differentiation.