Assessing Emotion Polyregulation in Daily Life: Who Uses It, When Is It Used, and How Effective Is It?

Ilana Ladis; Emma R Toner; Alexander R Daros; Katharine E Daniel; Mehdi Boukhechba; Philip I Chow; Laura E Barnes; Bethany A Teachman; Brett Q Ford

doi:10.1007/s42761-022-00166-x

Assessing Emotion Polyregulation in Daily Life: Who Uses It, When Is It Used, and How Effective Is It?

Affect Sci. 2022 Dec 8;4(2):248-259. doi: 10.1007/s42761-022-00166-x. eCollection 2023 Jun.

Authors

Ilana Ladis¹, Emma R Toner¹, Alexander R Daros¹, Katharine E Daniel¹, Mehdi Boukhechba², Philip I Chow³, Laura E Barnes², Bethany A Teachman¹, Brett Q Ford⁴

Affiliations

¹ Department of Psychology, University of Virginia, P.O. Box 400400, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4400 USA.
² Department of Engineering Systems and Environment, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA USA.
³ Department of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA USA.
⁴ Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON Canada.

PMID: 37304559
PMCID: PMC10247655 (available on 2024-06-01)
DOI: 10.1007/s42761-022-00166-x

Abstract

Most research on emotion regulation has focused on understanding individual emotion regulation strategies. Preliminary research, however, suggests that people often use several strategies to regulate their emotions in a given emotional scenario (polyregulation). The present research examined who uses polyregulation, when polyregulation is used, and how effective polyregulation is when it is used. College students (N = 128; 65.6% female; 54.7% White) completed an in-person lab visit followed by a 2-week ecological momentary assessment protocol with six randomly timed survey prompts per day for up 2 weeks. At baseline, participants completed measures assessing past-week depression symptoms, social anxiety-related traits, and trait emotion dysregulation. During each randomly timed prompt, participants reported up to eight strategies used to change their thoughts or feelings, negative and positive affect, motivation to change emotions, their social context, and how well they felt they were managing their emotions. In pre-registered analyses examining the 1,423 survey responses collected, polyregulation was more likely when participants were feeling more intensely negative and when their motivation to change their emotions was stronger. Neither sex, psychopathology-related symptoms and traits, social context, nor subjective effectiveness was associated with polyregulation, and state affect did not moderate these associations. This study helps address a key gap in the literature by assessing emotion polyregulation in daily life.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42761-022-00166-x.

Keywords: Affect; Daily life; Ecological momentary assessment; Emotion regulation; Mood.

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