The Role of Emotion-Regulation Strategies in Emotional Inertia: Testing a Within-Person Mediation Model

Emotions do not simply turn on and off again in an instant; rather, emotions rise and fall gradually, often persisting for a considerable period. Although it is normative for emotions to show a certain degree of momentum, the tendency for emotions to be overly persistent—a phenomenon known as emotional inertia—has been associated with psychological maladjustment. However, the mechanisms underlying emotional inertia remain unclear. We aimed to fill this gap in the current study by investigating how emotional inertia is mediated—at the within-person level—by the use of emotion-regulation strategies in daily life. We ran secondary analyses on eight experience sampling studies (total N = 948 participants measured at 73,472 occasions), in which participants reported their momentary experiences of positive affect (PA) and negative affect (NA), as well as their recent use of four emotion-regulation strategies. We used dynamic structural equation modelling (DSEM) to estimate within-person indirect effects of distraction, cognitive reappraisal, rumination, and expressive suppression on the inertia of PA and NA. All four emotion-regulation strategies reliably mediated NA inertia, with rumination and suppression showing the strongest indirect effects. In contrast, all strategies had only negligible indirect effects on the temporal persistence of PA. Taken together, our findings support the notion that the use of emotion-regulation strategies represents a potential mechanism underpinning emotional inertia, especially for NA. However, each regulation strategy explained no more than 13% of the total persistence in affect, suggesting factors other than emotion-regulation strategies also play important roles in emotional inertia.