ABSTRACT
Variability in the emotion regulation (ER) strategies one uses throughout daily life has been suggested to reflect adaptive ER ability and to act as a protective factor in mental health. Moreover, psychological inflexibility and persistent negative affect (or affective inertia) are key features of depression and other forms of mental illness and are often further exacerbated by rigid or overly passive regulatory behaviours. The current study investigated the hypothesis that ER variability might serve as a protective factor against depressive symptoms and affective inertia. Using experience-sampling (N = 213), we tested whether two indictors of ER variability (between- and within-strategy SDs) were related to depressive symptoms and affective inertia. We found that people with higher between-strategy variability and within-strategy variability (specifically for reappraisal and distraction) reported fewer depressive symptoms. Both within- and between-strategy variability were negatively related to negative affective inertia. Between-strategy variability and negative affective inertia had unique effects on depression, when used as simultaneous predictors. Altogether, this study provides further evidence for the utility of ER as a factor buffering against depressive symptoms and particularly for the use of variable ER strategies.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Authorship contribution statement
Xiaoqin Wang: Conceptualization, Investigation, Data curation, Methodology, Formal analysis, Visualization, Writing original draft. Scott Blain: Extensive revision and editing of the written article, including substantive contributions to the framing of research questions and interpretation of findings. Jie meng: Conceptualization, Data curation, Methodology. Yuan Liu: Conceptualization, Writing – review & editing. Jiang Qiu: Conceptualization, Investigation, Resources, Project administration.
Data availability statement
Part of the data from this study are available online at the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/yuh8b/). The other data (ESM self-report measures) used in this article are available upon request. Those data are being used in an unfinished longitudinal study, and so will not be made publicly available until that project is finished.