Do I really feel better? Effectiveness of emotion regulation strategies depends on the measure and social anxiety.

Abstract

Effective emotion regulation (ER) is important to long-term healthy functioning, but little is known about what constitutes effective ER in the moment or how social anxiety symptoms and different strategies influence short-term effectiveness outcomes. Intensive ecological momentary data from N = 124 college students illustrate how different ways of operationalizing ER effectiveness leads to different conclusions about the short-term effectiveness of different strategies in daily life. When effectiveness is operationalized as the degree to which participants judged that their ER attempts made them feel better, social anxiety severity was negatively associated with effectiveness, and avoidance-oriented strategies were judged to be less effective than engagement-oriented strategies. In contrast, when effectiveness is operationalized as the degree of change in self-reported affect following ER attempts, social anxiety severity was not related to effectiveness, and avoidance-oriented strategies were more effective than engagement-oriented strategies. Social anxiety and ER strategy type did not interact in either model, regardless of how effectiveness was measured. The study highlights discrepancies when examining two common but distinct ways of measuring the same overarching effectiveness construct, and raises intriguing questions about how forms of psychopathology that are intimately tied to emotion dysregulation, like social anxiety, moderate different ways of measuring the effectiveness of ER attempts.