Perceived stress moderates emotion regulation success in real-world contexts: an ecologically-valid multilevel investigation

ABSTRACT

Background

Emotion regulation plays a crucial role in well-being in everyday life. Effective emotion regulation depends upon adaptively matching a given strategy to a given situation. Recent research has begun to explore these interactions in the context of daily reports of perceived stress, affect, and emotion regulation strategy usage. To further understand these differences in strategy efficacy in an ecologically valid context, we examined responses to real world stressors in a young adult sample.

Methods

We surveyed a range of emotion regulation strategies, including two forms of cognitive reappraisal (i.e., reinterpretation, which involves cognitively reframing one’s emotional responses, and psychological distancing, which involves adopting an objective, impartial perspective). Participants reported strategy usage, momentary perceived stress, and affect in response to multiple ecological momentary assessments over a period of 7 days.

Results

Analyses of links between strategy usage and affect revealed that rumination was significantly negatively associated with more positive affect ratings. Further, a significant interaction between momentary perceived stress and reinterpretation usage was observed on affect, such that reinterpretation was more adaptive during situations perceived as less stressful.

Conclusion

These results provide further insight into the importance of situational context in determining the effectiveness of particular emotion regulation strategies.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotion regulation
• perceived stress
• ecological momentary assessment
• reappraisal
• reinterpretation
• distancing

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Madison Miller, Christopher Almendariz, and Alyssa Balandran for their assistance with data collection.

Data availability statement

Data are available on the Open-Science Framework (OSF) at the following link: https://osf.io/y4mkj/?view_only = a9e89266146e4b49a3e3f295399ff2f8

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.