Abstract
Negative emotion differentiation (ED) has been suggested to be important for adaptive emotion regulation (ER). However, knowledge concerning how ED may impact specific ER strategy choice remains surprisingly sparse. We therefore investigated (1) if person-level negative ED was associated with habitual use of individual ER strategies, (2) how person-level negative ED was associated with daily use of individual ER strategies, and finally (3) how within-person daily fluctuations in negative ED were associated with daily use of individual ER strategies. During a 10-day experience sampling study, 90 healthy participants rated their momentary emotions and their ER efforts in response to those emotions. ER strategies included four putatively adaptive strategies (reflection, distancing, non-reactivity, reappraisal) and four putatively maladaptive strategies (rumination, experiential avoidance, expressive suppression, worry). Results revealed that negative ED at the person level was neither associated with habitual nor daily ER strategy endorsement when controlling for negative emotions. Likewise, associations between within-individual daily variation in negative ED and daily ER did not remain statistically significant after controlling for negative emotions. The results thus point to no or weak associations between negative ED and ER choice above and beyond negative emotions. Future experimental studies addressing ED at the momentary level and teasing out the ED–ER causal timeline are needed to further evaluate ED–ER associations. Findings from such research may represent an important step toward refining psychotherapeutic interventions aimed at improving emotional problems.
Highlights
Across theoretical positions, emotions are said to arise in the face of something personally relevant in a given situation (Gross and Barrett, 2011)
The first aim was addressed with correlation analyses between person-level emotion differentiation (ED) and baseline emotion regulation (ER) strategies, exploring how person-level negative ED was associated with habitual use of individual ER strategies
For daily putatively adaptive ER strategies, person-level ED was positively associated with all ER strategies, but none of the associations were statistically significant when controlling for mean levels of negative emotions across the study period
Summary
Emotions are said to arise in the face of something personally relevant in a given situation (Gross and Barrett, 2011). As with ED, ER may be conceptualized at the person-level, reflecting habitual regulatory tendencies, from which point the individual may fluctuate from day to day or moment to moment (Gross, 2014; Aldao et al, 2015; Kalokerinos et al, 2019) At this point, it remains unknown how ED—at the between and within-person level—may be differentially associated with the use of particular ER strategies. This study was an experience-sampling study (involving two samples; N = 51 and 39), in which participants were asked to rate both emotions and ER efforts three (i.e., Sample 1) or four (i.e., Sample 2) times a day over 10 days With this design, we were able to evaluate both the person- and day-level association between negative ED and daily ER strategy choices. Following recent findings and recommendations (see Dejonckheere et al, 2019; Kalokerinos et al, 2019), we wanted to assess the unique contribution of ED to ER strategy selection and evaluated the extent to which ED was associated with ER above and beyond negative emotions
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