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Emotion regulation strategy selection in daily life: The role of social context and goals

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Abstract

Recent studies have begun to document the diversity of ways people regulate their emotions. However, one unanswered question is why people regulate their emotions as they do in everyday life. In the present research, we examined how social context and goals influence strategy selection in daily high points and low points. As expected, suppression was particularly tied to social features of context: it was used more when others were present, especially non-close partners, and when people had instrumental goals, especially more interpersonal ones (e.g., avoid conflict). Distraction and reappraisal were used more when regulating for hedonic reasons (e.g., to feel better), but these strategies were also linked to certain instrumental goals (e.g., getting work done). When contra-hedonic regulation occurred, it primarily took the form of dampening positive emotion during high points. Suppression was more likely to be used for contra-hedonic regulation, whereas reappraisal and distraction were used more for pro-hedonic regulation. Overall, these findings highlight the social nature of emotion regulation and underscore the importance of examining regulation in both positive and negative contexts.

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Notes

  1. While these data technically have a 3-level structure (where level 1 = high/low event, level 2 = day, and level 3 = participant), implementing a three-level model requires a minimum of 20–30 clusters at level 2 (Snijders and Bosker, 1999). This was not feasible due to the small number of level-2 clusters (i.e., n = 7 days). In addition, when using a subset of regulated events, most variance in goals and strategies was observed at levels 1 and 3, with 0–7% at level 2; this variance distribution further supports collapsing across level 2 units and implementing a two-level analysis.

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Acknowledgements

This study was funded by National Institutes of Health (Grant Number MH58147).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychological and Brain Science, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA

    Tammy English

  2. Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Ihno A. Lee & James J. Gross

  3. Department of Psychology, Institute of Personality and Social Research, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Oliver P. John

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  1. Tammy English
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  2. Ihno A. Lee
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  4. James J. Gross
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Correspondence to Tammy English.

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Tammy English, Ihno A. Lee, Oliver P. John, James J. Gross declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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English, T., Lee, I.A., John, O.P. et al. Emotion regulation strategy selection in daily life: The role of social context and goals. Motiv Emot 41, 230–242 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-016-9597-z

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