Emotion Regulation Strategies are Associated with Differential Responses to the News

Daily negativity in the news can cause people to experience negative affect, negatively affects mental wellbeing, and, in response, people (temporarily) avoid the news. Others, however, seem to handle recurring news negativity better. We theorize that the way people regulate emotional responses to the news could help explain the different patterns of coping with the news. We do this by introducing the emotion regulation literature from psychology in the political communication literature. We investigate if, and to what extent, emotion regulation in response to news use is associated with negative affect, mental wellbeing, and news use frequency. In a preregistered longitudinal intensive diary study in a diverse sample from Western Europe, we find that individuals rely on various emotion regulation strategies to cope with news negativity. We find that people use cognitive reappraisal and selective attention to successfully down-regulate negative emotions arising from news use. On the other hand, no effects of the use of distraction or suppression on affect, wellbeing, or news use frequency were found. Thus, the study offers first evidence that some emotion regulation strategies could be one determinant in explaining why people are affected differently by the news. Our study sets the stage for a research agenda in political communication research that studies the role of emotion regulation strategies in understanding differential media effects.