Emotional awareness moderates the relationship between emotion recognition and emotion regulation: Exploratory and confirmatory evidence.
Abstract
Effective emotion regulation plays a critical role in mental health. Identifying factors that contribute to this ability could have clinical relevance. Two candidate factors are emotion recognition and emotional awareness. Specifically, if one does not recognize emotions in the self or others-and does not have a fine-grained understanding (trait awareness) of those emotions-it may be difficult to identify effective regulation strategies. Here, we tested whether individual differences in awareness moderate the association between recognition and regulation. Two independent samples of participants (Sample 1: N = 375, 72.8% female, 63.2% White [collected between 2018 and 2020]; Sample 2: N = 196, 67.3% female, 63.8% White [collected between 2020 and 2021]) completed a battery of commonly used self-report and performance-based (PB) measures of each construct. Self-report measures showed the expected pattern of significant positive associations; however, correlations between self-report and PB measures were largely absent. In both samples, two self-reported aspects of emotional awareness-greater emotion vocabulary and a better understanding of how emotions relate to bodily sensations-were significant moderators. In particular, they each strengthened the link between better self-focused emotion recognition (interoception, internal attention) and greater tendencies to use mindfulness-based regulation strategies. Novel positive associations were also observed between PB measures of each construct (e.g., tests of emotion recognition in faces/voices, emotion concept knowledge, and choice of regulation responses within hypothetical scenarios). However, hypothesized moderation patterns in PB measures could not be replicated. These results highlight new pathways and specific measurement approaches that might be utilized in future studies aiming to improve mental health and well-being. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).