Why do feelings persist over time in daily life? Investigating the role of emotion-regulation strategies in the process underlying emotional inertia

Emotions do not simply turn on and off again in an instant; rather, emotions rise and fallgradually, often persisting for a considerable period. Although it is normative for emotions toshow a degree of momentum—a phenomenon known as emotional inertia—the tendency foremotions to be overly persistent has been associated with psychological maladjustment.However, the mechanisms underlying emotional inertia remain unclear. We aimed to fill thisgap in the current study by investigating how the persistence of affect over time (emotionalinertia) is mediated—at the within-person level—by the use of emotion-regulation strategiesin daily life. We ran secondary analyses on eight experience-sampling datasets collectedbetween 2009 and 2021 (total N = 948 participants measured at 73,472 occasions), in whichparticipants reported their momentary experiences of positive affect (PA) and negative affect(NA), and their recent use of four emotion-regulation strategies (distraction, cognitivereappraisal, rumination, and expressive suppression). We used dynamic structural equationmodelling (DSEM) to estimate indirect effects of each strategy on the inertia of PA and NA.All four strategies reliably mediated both NA and (to a lesser extent) PA inertia, supportingthe notion that the use of emotion-regulation strategies represents a mechanism underpinningemotional inertia, at least among highly educated, non-clinical, Australian and Belgian youngadults. However, each regulation strategy reduced the total autoregressive slope of affect at t–1 predicting affect at t by no more than 13%, suggesting factors other than emotion-regulation strategies also play important roles in emotional inertia.