Relationships between trait emotion dysregulation and emotional experiences in daily life: an experience sampling study

ABSTRACT

Few studies have examined how trait emotion dysregulation relates to momentary affective experiences and the emotion regulation (ER) strategies people use in daily life. In the current study, 112 college students completed a trait measure of emotion dysregulation and completed experience sampling and end-of-day surveys over a two- to three-week period, asking about their emotional experiences and ER strategy use. Participants completed a total of 3798 experience sampling (in-the-moment) and 995 nightly diary surveys. We examined the top 40% of each participant’s reported instances of negative affect (to capture times when emotions more likely need regulation). Results indicated that a higher level of trait emotion dysregulation was associated with the following in-the-moment responses: (a) higher level of negative affect; (b) greater desire to change emotions; (c) more attempts to regulate emotion; (d) higher relative endorsements of avoidant (e.g. thought suppression) versus engagement (e.g. acceptance) ER strategy use; and (e) lower perceived effectiveness of ER. Further, individuals with a higher (vs. lower) level of trait emotion dysregulation were less able to identify emotions over the course of the day. Findings demonstrate how trait emotion dysregulation may predict emotional experiences and ER in daily life.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotion regulation
• experience sampling
• mental health
• emotion

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 We initially characterized this strategy as “introspection” to avoid potential negative interpretations usually applied to rumination as an ER strategy (given thinking a lot about thoughts/feelings is not necessarily maladaptive). However, previous experience sampling studies have defined rumination with a similar description (e.g., Heiy & Cheavens, 2014; McMahon & Naragon-Gainey, 2019), so to facilitate the integration of findings across studies, we now refer to this strategy as “rumination/introspection.”

2 We assessed whether participants were more likely to endorse “no ER” after being in the study for 1 week, given concern over potential non-compliance over time. The proportion of “no ER” endorsements only increased 10% after week 1 and participants were equally likely to report an increase in the use of “no ER” (n = 57) or maintain/decrease their use of this option (n = 55) after the first week in the study.

3 We also preregistered a hypothesised relationship between higher trait emotion dysregulation and lower state positive affect (when considering a subset of heightened positive affect observations among participants, to create an analogous dataset to the negative affect one used for the main analyses). Because this involved creating and characterising a third subset of data, we opted for simplicity in the main presentation of this study and report this relationship here instead. Following similar procedures above and identifying a subset of data corresponding to the top 40% of participant’s positive affect ratings (n = 1604 observations), trait emotion dysregulation was found to be negatively associated with state positive affect, even after correcting for multiple tests, β_p = −.26, SE = .08, t(110) = −3.35, 95% CI [−.41, −.10], p_corrected  = .002.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a University of Virginia Hobby Postdoctoral and Predoctoral Fellowship Grant awarded to L.E.B. and B.A.T., and a National Institute of Mental Health R01MH113752 grant to B.A.T. Preregistration document and data that were analysed in this study are available at the Open Science Framework, https://osf.io/fjzgs/.