Beliefs About Emotions in Self and Others: Links with Emotion Regulation and Psychological Distress

Beliefs about emotions are an important yet understudied beliefs proposed to influence emotion regulation and psychological distress. Here, we replicated research on the relationship between beliefs about emotions in general, emotion regulation, and psychological distress, and extended it by examining the relative importance of beliefs about one’s own emotions and others’ emotions. A sample of 244 adults completed self-report measures of beliefs about emotions, as well as emotion regulation and psychological distress. Our results demonstrated that maladaptive beliefs about emotions are associated with a more maladaptive pattern of emotion regulation strategy use and heightened psychological distress. This pattern was observed for beliefs about emotions in general, as well as beliefs about one’s own and others’ emotions. Moreover, beliefs about one’s own emotions explained a significantly greater proportion of variance in emotion regulation and psychological distress than beliefs about others’ emotions. Mediation analyses indicated that, across all three types of emotion beliefs, stronger maladaptive beliefs were associated with heightened psychological distress through lower use of reappraisal and greater use of suppression. These findings support the specifications of the affective science frameworks like the process model of emotion regulation, highlighting the important role of emotion beliefs in emotion regulation and affective outcomes.