Situation selection is a particularly effective emotion regulation strategy for people who need help regulating their emotions

ABSTRACT

Situation selection involves choosing situations based on their likely emotional impact and may be less cognitively taxing or challenging to implement compared to other strategies for regulating emotion, which require people to regulate their emotions “in the moment”; we thus predicted that individuals who chronically experience intense emotions or who are not particularly competent at employing other emotion regulation strategies would be especially likely to benefit from situation selection. Consistent with this idea, we found that the use of situation selection interacted with individual differences in emotional reactivity and competence at emotion regulation to predict emotional outcomes in both a correlational (Study 1; N = 301) and an experimental field study (Study 2; N = 125). Taken together, the findings suggest that situation selection is an effective strategy for regulating emotions, especially for individuals who otherwise struggle to do so.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotion regulation
• situation selection
• reappraisal
• suppression

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Hereafter, we refer to this construct merely as ‘reactivity’. Reactivity encompasses the idea of affect intensity (i.e. stable individual differences in the magnitude of emotional responses, Larsen & Diener, 1987), but also reflects individual differences in peoples' sensitivity to emotions and the duration of emotional responses (Nock et al., 2008).

2. We asked participants to focus on the day before to ensure that participants reported on a full day's worth of emotions. We chose not to focus on the present day's emotions since this was an online study and participants could have responded at any time of the day, possibly before experiencing many emotions (e.g. if responding very early in the morning).

3. Participants also completed the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS; Gratz & Roemer, 2004) and the COPE Inventory (Carver, Scheier, & Weintraub, 1989). The questions were presented in a random order, both within and between measures, with the exception of the ERQ because the first and third items define positive and negative emotion, respectively (i.e. “When I want to feel more positive emotion (such as joy or amusement), I change what I’m thinking about and When I want to feel less negative emotion (such as sadness or anger), I change what I’m thinking about”).

4. Participants were asked to select a specific response to the statement I manage my emotions by playing tennis that was presented along with the statements comprising the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (Gross & John, 2003).

5. The data for Study 2 come from a larger research project. Participants also completed the DERS and self-assessment manikins for arousal. However, as the manipulation of situation selection used in Study 2 focused on the valence of emotional outcomes and our predictions concerned reactivity and competence at emotion regulation, these measures are not discussed further. As in Study 1, with the exception of the ERQ, the questions were presented in a random order, both within and between measures.

6. Note that the instructions provided to participants in the experimental condition involved both (i) instructions to consider the affective impact of various activities and situations when deciding whether or not to engage in them and (ii) forming a plan to support this intention. Although such instructions essentially manipulate both goal and implementation intentions, given the oft-cited gap between (goal) intentions and action (e.g. Sheeran, 2002; Webb & Sheeran, 2006) our priority was to ensure that our manipulation of situation selection was as effective as possible. Future work might consider also having participants in the control condition form a comparable goal intention (i.e. to consider the effect of activities and situations on their emotions) in order to test the specific effect of if-then planning.