The Unique Relations between Emotional Awareness and Facets of Affective Instability.

The relation between affective instability and two facets of emotional awareness, attention to emotion and clarity of emotion, was examined in two community samples (Ns = 303, 101) and one student sample (N=409). Affective instability was positively associated with attention to emotion and negatively associated with clarity of emotion. The two facets of affective instability, affect intensity and emotional variability, were differentially associated with the two components of emotional awareness. As hypothesized, affect intensity was uniquely associated with attention to emotion, whereas emotional variability was uniquely (inversely) associated with clarity of emotion even after taking into account shared variance with neuroticism and gender.