The present study sought to address the relationship between emotion regulation and wellbeing. Prior research has mainly focused on a subset of emotion regulation strategies, typically manipulated in lab settings, and has largely been based on the study of individuals from a very limited range of cultural contexts. In the present study, we examined the contribution of the use and variability of six key emotion regulation strategies to wellbeing within one large-scale study in the context of a shared stressor: the COVID-19 pandemic. We tested the cross-cultural consistency of our findings in a large sample (N = 23,865) with participants from 51 countries, using a wide variety of cultural orientations. In line with our pre-registered hypotheses, we found that acceptance and reappraisal were predictive of higher wellbeing, while rumination and suppression were predictive of lower wellbeing. Social sharing and distraction yielded more mixed findings. Notably, acceptance and rumination were the strongest predictors of wellbeing, thus emerging as the promise and peril of emotion regulation. Except for suppression, these effects were replicated in two separate representative samples (N = 2000). Moreover, we found a small but inconsistent positive association between emotion regulation variability and wellbeing, pointing to the importance of flexibly attuning regulatory strategies to situational demands. Finally, cultural orientations did not moderate these relationships, demonstrating a great degree of cross-cultural consistency in both the use of emotion regulation strategies, and their associations with wellbeing. These findings demonstrate that, across cultures, several emotion regulation strategies, particularly acceptance and rumination, shape wellbeing.
Flexible Emotion Regulation: How Situational Demands and Individual Differences Influence the Effectiveness of Regulatory Strategies
