Exploring Reasons Why People Do Not Regulate Their Emotions

Research to date focuses on how people regulate their emotions, but more commonly, people do not regulate their emotions. To understand this phenomenon, we built a bottom-up taxonomy of reasons why people do not regulate. In Study 1a (N=250 UK community members) people who did not regulate during a recent stressful event were asked to describe their reasons. We coded responses to establish a list of 14 reasons, and in Study 1b (N=248 UK community members) presented this list to a new sample who rated their agreement to the reasons relating to a stressful event. Study 2 (N=326 Australian community members) investigated the frequency of reasons for not regulating in everyday life using experience sampling. The most common reasons for not regulating under stress (Studies 1a and 1b) were, believing one’s feelings were valid, not wanting to make things worse, and feeling there was nothing one could do in the situation. The most common reasons for not regulating in daily life (Study 2) were believing one’s feelings were valid, and that regulating didn’t cross one’s mind. In Studies 1b and 2, we tested whether reason endorsement differed based on affect intensity. In times of higher than usual negative affect, people most consistently chose not to initiate emotion regulation because they did not know how. Practically, this work highlights new avenues for intervening to foster emotion regulation, if and when, it is desired. Theoretically, this work highlights the importance of studying emotion regulation as a process that is—and importantly is not—initiated.