Emotion regulation in everyday life: Mapping global self-reports to daily processes.

Recent theory conceptualizes emotion regulation as occurring across three stages: (a) identifying the need to regulate, (b) selecting a strategy, and (c) implementing that strategy to modify emotions. Yet, measurement of emotion regulation has not kept pace with these theoretical advances. In particular, widely used global self-report questionnaires are often assumed to index people's typical strategy selection tendencies. However, it is unclear how well global self-reports capture individual differences in strategy selection and/or whether they may also index other emotion regulation stages. To address this issue, we examined how global self-report measures correspond with the three stages of emotion regulation as modeled using daily life data. We analyzed data from nine daily diary and experience sampling studies (total N = 1,097), in which participants provided daily and global self-reports of cognitive reappraisal, expressive suppression, and rumination. We found only weak-to-moderate correlations between global self-reports and average daily self-reports of each regulation strategy (indexing strategy selection). Global self-reports also correlated with individual differences in the degree to which (a) preceding affect experience predicted regulation strategies (representing the identification stage), and (b) regulation strategies predicted subsequent changes in affective experience (representing the implementation stage). Our findings suggest that global self-report measures of reappraisal, suppression, and rumination may not strongly and uniquely correlate with individual differences in daily selection of these strategies. Moreover, global self-report measures may also index individual differences in the perceived need to regulate, and the affective consequences of regulation in daily life. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Social Support Predicts Differential Use, but not Differential Effectiveness, of Expressive Suppression and Social Sharing in Daily Life.

While emotion regulation often happens in the presence of others, little is known about how social context shapes regulatory efforts and outcomes. One key element of the social context is social support. In two experience sampling studies (Ns = 179 and 123), we examined how the use and affective consequences of two fundamentally social emotion-regulation strategies-social sharing and expressive suppression-vary as a function of perceived social support. Across both studies, we found evidence that social support was associated with variation in people's use of these strategies, such that when people perceived their environments as being higher (vs. lower) in social support, they engaged in more sharing and less suppression. However, we found only limited and inconsistent support for context-dependent affective outcomes of suppression and sharing: suppression was associated with better affective consequences in the context of higher perceived social support in Study 1, but this effect did not replicate in Study 2. Taken together, these findings suggest that the use of social emotion-regulation strategies may depend on contextual variability in social support, whereas their effectiveness does not. Future research is needed to better understand the circumstances in which context-dependent use of emotion regulation may have emotional benefits, accounting for personal, situational, and cultural factors. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42761-022-00123-8.