Emotion regulation in daily life: The roles of emotional experience, expression, and regulation strategy

While recent evidence has pointed to disturbances in emotion regulation strategy use in schizophrenia, few studies have examined how these regulation strategies relate to emotionality and social behavior in daily life. Using ecological momentary assessment (EMA), we investigated the relationship between emotion regulation, emotional experience, and social interaction in the daily lives of individuals with schizophrenia. Participants ( N = 30) used mobile phones to complete online questionnaires reporting their daily emotional experience and social interaction. Participants also completed self-report measures of habitual emotion regulation. Hierarchical linear modeling revealed that self-reported use of cognitive reappraisal and savoring of emotional experiences were related to greater positive emotion in daily life. In contrast, self-reported suppression was related to greater negative emotion, reduced positive emotion, and reduced social interaction in daily life. These findings suggest that individual differences in habitual emotion regulation strategy usage have important relationships to everyday emotional and social experiences in schizophrenia.

Download Full-text

Assessment of health related issues in individuals’, couples’, and families’ daily life

Zeitschrift für Gesundheitspsychologie ◽

10.1026/0943-8149.16.3.146 ◽

2008 ◽

Vol 16 (3) ◽

pp. 146-149 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Meinrad Perrez ◽

Michael Reicherts ◽

Yves Hänggi ◽

Andrea B. Horn ◽

Gisela Michel ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Emotion Regulation ◽

Daily Life ◽

Ecological Validity ◽

Reliability And Validity ◽

Well Being ◽

Computer Assisted ◽

Emotional States ◽

Self Reports ◽

Health Related ◽

Lower Variability

Abstract. Most research in health psychology is based on retrospective self reports, which are distorted by recall biases and have low ecological validity. To overcome such limitations we developed computer assisted diary approaches to assess health related behaviours in individuals’, couples’ and families’ daily life. The event- and time-sampling-based instruments serve to assess appraisals of the current situation, feelings of physical discomfort, current emotional states, conflict and emotion regulation in daily life. They have proved sufficient reliability and validity in the context of individual, couple and family research with respect to issues like emotion regulation and health. As examples: Regarding symptom reporting curvilinear pattern of frequencies over the day could be identified by parents and adolescents; or psychological well-being is associated with lower variability in basic affect dimensions. In addition, we report on preventive studies to improve parental skills and enhance their empathic competences towards their baby, and towards their partner.

Download Full-text

Emotional Variability Predicts Tiredness in Daily Life

Journal of Individual Differences ◽

10.1027/1614-0001/a000206 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 37 (3) ◽

pp. 181-193 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Aire Mill ◽

Anu Realo ◽

Jüri Allik

Keyword(s):

Sampling Method ◽

Daily Life ◽

Emotional Experience ◽

Experience Sampling ◽

Experience Sampling Method ◽

Building Blocks ◽

Intraindividual Variability ◽

Unique Role ◽

Over Time

Abstract. Intraindividual variability, along with the more frequently studied between-person variability, has been argued to be one of the basic building blocks of emotional experience. The aim of the current study is to examine whether intraindividual variability in affect predicts tiredness in daily life. Intraindividual variability in affect was studied with the experience sampling method in a group of 110 participants (aged between 19 and 84 years) during 14 consecutive days on seven randomly determined occasions per day. The results suggest that affect variability is a stable construct over time and situations. Our findings also demonstrate that intraindividual variability in affect has a unique role in predicting increased levels of tiredness at the momentary level as well at the level of individuals.

Download Full-text

Neural mechanisms of the cognitive control of emotion

Acta Neuropsychiatrica ◽

10.1111/j.1601-5215.2006.00149.x ◽

2006 ◽

Vol 18 (3-4) ◽

pp. 144-153 ◽

Cited By ~ 21

Author(s):

Melissa J. Green ◽

Gin S. Malhi

Keyword(s):

Emotion Regulation ◽

Cognitive Control ◽

Psychiatric Disorders ◽

Psychological Health ◽

Emotion Dysregulation ◽

Emotional Experience ◽

Cognitive Strategies ◽

Emotion Perception ◽

Neural Mechanisms ◽

Emotion Generation

Background:Emotion regulation involves the initiation of new emotional responses and continual alteration of current emotions in response to rapidly changing environmental and social stimuli. The capacity to effectively implement emotion regulation strategies is essential for psychological health; impairments in the ability to regulate emotions may be critical to the development of clinical levels of depression, anxiety and mania.Objective:This review provides a summary of findings from current research examining the neural mechanisms of emotion regulation by means of conscious cognitive strategies of reappraisal. These findings are considered in the context of related concepts of emotion perception and emotion generation, with discussion of the likely cognitive neuropsychological contributions to emotion regulation and the implications for psychiatric disorders.Results:Convergent evidence implicates an inhibitory role of prefrontal cortex and cingulate regions upon subcortical and cortical emotion generation systems in the cognitive control of emotional experience. Concurrent modulation of cortical activity by the peripheral nervous system is highlighted by recent studies using simultaneous physiological and neuroimaging techniques. Individual differences in emotion perception, generation of affect and neuropsychological skills are likely to have direct consequences for emotion regulation.Conclusions:Emotion regulation relies on synergy within brain stem, limbic and cortical processes that promote the adaptive perception, generation and regulation of affect. Aberrant emotion processing in any of these stages may disrupt this self-sustaining regulatory system, with the potential to manifest in distinct forms of emotion dysregulation as seen in major psychiatric disorders such as depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.

Download Full-text

Concurrent and Lagged Relations between Emotion Regulation and Affect in Adolescents’ Daily Life

The Spanish Journal of Psychology ◽

10.1017/sjp.2018.61 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 21 ◽

Author(s):

Eliana Silva ◽

Teresa Freire ◽

Susana Faria

Keyword(s):

Emotion Regulation ◽

Negative Affect ◽

Positive Affect ◽

Sampling Method ◽

Daily Life ◽

Cognitive Reappraisal ◽

Expressive Suppression ◽

Daily Lives ◽

Trait Level

AbstractA better understanding of emotion regulation (ER) within daily life is a growing focus of research. This study evaluated the average use of two ER strategies (cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression) and concurrent and lagged relationships between these two ER strategies and affect (positive and negative affect) in the daily lives of adolescents. We also investigated the role of the same strategies at the trait level on these within-person relationships. Thirty-three adolescents provided 1,258 reports of their daily life by using the Experience Sampling Method for one week. Regarding the relative use of ER strategies, cognitive reappraisal (M = 2.87, SD = 1.58) was used more often than expressive suppression (M = 2.42, SD = 1.21). While the use of both strategies was positively correlated when evaluated in daily life (p = .01), the same did not occur at the trait level (p = .37). Multilevel analysis found that ER strategies were concurrently related to affect (p < .01), with the exception of cognitive reappraisal-positive affect relationship (p = .11). However, cognitive reappraisal predicted higher positive affect at the subsequent sampling moment ( β = 0.07, p = .03). The concurrent associations between cognitive reappraisal and negative affect vary as function of the use of this strategy at the trait level (β = 0.05, p = .02). Our findings highlighted the complex associations between daily ER strategies and affect of a normative sample of adolescents.

Download Full-text