Emotion regulation as an idiographic dynamic system: Individual differences in success of goal-directed regulation in daily life

People vary in how their emotional experiences change over time, so dynamical systems theory has been suggested to understand daily emotion regulation processes. However, it is not clear whether dynamic changes in emotions over time, such as return to a person-specific affective baseline, reflect successful engagement in goal-directed emotion regulation or simply automatic fluctuations of a self-regulating system. In two experience sampling studies (5x/day for 21 days) with total N=450 young adult participants, we use person-specific change-as-outcome models, implemented through continuous-time modeling, to investigate dynamic changes in emotions while considering momentary goals to up or downregulate positive and negative affect. We show that people differ from each other in their attractor location (i.e., affective baseline) and their attractor strength (i.e., how quickly they return to their affective baseline) when not accounting for goals. We also show that people vary in whether their emotion systems respond to emotion regulation goals, highlighting that for about 65% of people, their emotions do not change based on their regulation goals. However, we show that individual differences in well-being and regulation strategy use are related to differences in simple and goal-directed changes in emotions. This highlights that emotion regulation success indicated by motivated changes in daily emotions is rare, but individual differences in these motivated changes in addition to simple emotion dynamics provide relevant insight into people’s emotional lives. This work highlights the importance of differentiating goal-independent fluctuations of dynamic affective systems from conscious emotion regulation in daily life.