Interpersonal emotion regulation strategies: can they function differently under certain conditions?

Abstract

Emotion Regulation (ER) is an umbrella term that covers both interpersonal and intrapersonal strategies aimed at modifying the duration, intensity and type of emotions that the individuals are experiencing. Although the connection between intrapersonal emotion regulation strategies and psychological distress is well documented, the evidence regarding the association between interpersonal emotion regulation (IER) strategies and psychological distress is rather limited and inconsistent, indicating the need to better understand the conditions in which the association between IER strategies and psychological distress becomes stronger. The current study examined the association of the interaction between maladaptive intrapersonal emotion regulation and IER strategies (i.e., enhancement of positive affect, perspective-taking, social modeling, and soothing) with anxiety and depression. In order to examine this, we asked 318 Turkish individuals (243 females; M = 21.17, SD = 1.89) to complete an online survey which included scales assessing IER, maladaptive cognitive emotion regulation, anxiety and depression. The moderation analyses indicated that interaction of soothing with maladaptive ER strategies was significantly linked with depression, indicating that frequent use of soothing as an IER strategy is linked with lower levels of depression in individuals that rarely use maladaptive emotion regulation strategies (i.e., rumination, and catastrophizing). However, similar results were not observed for anxiety. The findings suggest that the association of especially soothing dimension of IER with depression may change depending on the individual’s use of other emotion regulation strategies and soothing may function adaptively under certain conditions.