How you think about an emotion predicts how you regulate: an experience-sampling study

ABSTRACT

Emotion evaluations are assumed to play a crucial role in the emotion regulation process. We tested a postulate from our framework of emotion dysregulation (Nowak, U., Wittkamp, M. F., Clamor, A., & Lincoln, T. M. [2021]. Using the Ball-in-Bowl metaphor to outline an integrative framework for understanding dysregulated emotion. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 12, 118), namely that the extent to which individuals evaluate an emotion as harmful and their personal resources to modify and accept/tolerate the emotion as sufficient predict the subsequent use of regulation strategies. Participants (n = 118) from a community sample took part in an experience-sampling assessment over 7 days including 10 daily paired measurements. The first measured momentary affective valence and arousal along with harmfulness evaluations and evaluations of personal resources to modify and accept/tolerate an emotion. The second followed three minutes later and measured emotion regulation strategies. The more harmful individuals evaluated an emotion, the more likely they were to use an emotion regulation strategy. The more harmful individuals evaluated an emotion, and the less sufficient they evaluated their personal resources to accept/tolerate an emotion, the more likely they were to use a maladaptive emotion regulation strategy. We conclude that emotions that people evaluate as harmful or difficult to accept are most likely to be regulated in a maladaptive manner. This implies that modifying beliefs about emotions could represent a promising treatment approach.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotion beliefs
• acceptance
• cognitive reappraisal
• ecological momentary assessment
• avoidance‌

Acknowledgements

We want to thank the students involved in data collection: Jurek Hofmann, Nicoleta Mihailova, Gianna Nolte, Parisa Parchami, Saba Vafaei.

Disclosure statement

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

Data availability statement

Datasets described in this paper are available from the corresponding author on request.

Notes

1 Following the logic of our theory here, we will only consider adaptive strategies under the categories of modificatory and non-modificatory strategies, although some maladaptive strategies might also aim to change an emotion.