The regulation of recurrent negative emotion in the aftermath of a lost election

ABSTRACT

For some American voters, the news of Mr. Trump's victory in the 2016 presidential election caused recurrent emotions that were negative, persistent, and intense enough to elicit repeated attempts at emotion regulation. This afforded a rare opportunity to analyse the regulation of recurrent emotions in a natural, non-laboratory context. The regulation of recurrent emotion involves additional considerations relative to single-instance emotion, such as representations of past and future encounters with the emotion-eliciting variables, ongoing consequences of each regulatory episode, and a tendency to repeatedly deploy emotion regulation strategies that one is most familiar with in the context of the particular recurrent emotion. Despite the ubiquitous nature of recurrent emotions, its associated regulatory processes have been infrequently examined and are not well-understood. Over eight days (11/10/16–11/18/16), we administered four surveys to 202 participants who voted against Mr. Trump. We examined the determinants and outcomes of regulatory strategies in the context of recurrent emotion. We found that (1) reappraisal (compared to distraction and acceptance) was associated with greater decline in emotion intensity, (2) high-intensity emotions were more likely to be distracted, whereas low-intensity emotions were more likely to be reappraised, and (3) strategy variability was associated with greater affective adaptation.

KEYWORDS:

• Recurrent emotion
• reappraisal
• emotion regulation choice
• emotion regulation variability
• U.S. Presidential election

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The data and analyses that support the findings of this study are openly available on the OSF website at https://osf.io/vcfb8/.

Notes

1 To be clear, we do not distinguish between conscious and unconscious choices in the context of this report. Participants’ ER choices likely span the spectrum from deliberate, conscious decisions to unconscious, automatic decisions.

2 Despite the increased time interval between the intensity measurement and strategy report in Wave 3, the same pattern of significant results was found. However, in Wave 4, where the period between surveys was greatest, no significant relationship was found.

3 “No regulation” was only added as an option starting at Wave 2 given the prevalence of free-response answers that implied no regulation in Wave 1.

4 We would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for calling attention to this important point.