Creative and depressive profiles shape divergent thinking in emotion regulation idea generation

Emotion regulation (ER) is a multi-faceted process, though its generative component––wherein one ideates situation-specific regulatory options (“techniques”)––is poorly understood. Through a novel task (ERGen), we evaluated ER repertoires based on the techniques that individuals generate to regulate their emotional response to negative scenarios. We hypothesized these repertoires to be sensitive to creative (divergent-thinking originality) ability and depression symptoms in our online adult sample (N = 143). Human raters and a generative pre-trained transformer (GPT-4o) coded each generated technique (n = 7854) into one of 14 regulatory strategies to model repertoire richness (strategy diversity) and size (technique count). Individuals higher in creativity showed more prolific technique generation across many strategies, whereas individuals with more depressive symptoms showed altered generation within specific strategies, and reduced deviation from habitual ER tendencies. These findings highlight an untapped research sphere that can motivate new intervention targets in affective disorders, including divergent-thinking ability.