Emotion regulation monitoring in daily life: The roles of event intensity, emotion intensity, perceived regulation success and psychopathology

Purpose During emotional events, people monitor the effectiveness of their emotion regulation (ER) to decide whether to keep using their current ER strategy, switch to a new strategy, or stop the regulation process. However, there is little empirical research on the monitoring phase of ER, particularly on what and how situational and individual factors influence this process. Methods We tested situational and individual factors as predictors of real-life ER monitoring decisions. 155 young adults responded to 5 prompts per day in a 7-day experience sampling protocol. At each prompt they described an emotional event, rated the intensity of event, their current emotions and perceived success in ER, and reported their decision to simply stop using their current ER strategy or to switch to a new strategy during the event. Results Multilevel modeling results showed the decision to stop using the current ER strategy was predicted by perceived success in ER after both positive and negative events, and by depressive and anxiety symptoms after positive events. The decision to switch to a new strategy was more likely when there were high negative emotions after a negative event, and less likely when there was perceived success after a positive event. Conclusions These findings suggest that situational and individual factors affect people’s decisions about how to regulate emotion. Interventions addressing excessive emotion regulation issues in response to positive events and their underlying causes may benefit individuals with depression or anxiety.