Emotion regulation strategy use in response to daily stressors among college students: an experience sampling study

Emotion regulation strategies play a critical role in helping people manage stressors and maintain psychological well-being. Understanding the efficacy and boundary conditions of regulatory strategies—as they are implemented in response to stressors in daily life—is especially important for college-aged students, a population that has been experiencing chronically high levels of depression and anxiety in recent years. Here, we utilized ecological momentary assessment (EMA) to capture college students’ use of multiple emotion regulation strategies in response to idiosyncratic, real-world stressors, as well as the effects of strategy use on momentary stress levels and momentary affect. Following a preregistered analytic plan, we first combined two EMA samples from Rice University and Bard College (N=159) to examine effects of strategy use on momentary affect. We also investigated the influence of factors that could interact with strategy use, namely momentary fluctuations in mental exhaustion and people’s general propensity to experience distress in the first place. Some results were consistent with our preregistered, a priori hypotheses, with rumination negatively associated with momentary affect, but use of other strategies did not significantly predict changes in momentary affect. Contrary to our predictions, efficacy of reappraisal slightly increased at higher levels of mental exhaustion. Exploratory analyses revealed that the number of adaptive strategies positively predicted momentary affect and the number of maladaptive strategies negatively predicted momentary affect. Overall, this study contributes to the growing body of research on the variable effects of emotion regulation strategies in real-world contexts. Our findings also speak to the dynamic interplay between strategy type/tactic, situational factors, and individual characteristics to drive changes in momentary affect.