ERcontext · How to deal with how you feel: Understanding and training context-dependent emotion regulation

How to deal with how you feel: Understanding and training context-dependent emotion regulation

Emotion regulation refers to the variety of processes through which people try to influence their emotions, for example, by distracting themselves, rethinking the situation, or hiding how they feel from other people. A large body of research has shown that effective emotion regulation is an important component of well-being. The ability to effectively regulate emotion has been linked with better physical and mental health, better social relationships, and even better memory (Gross, 2015), suggesting that effective emotion regulation is important in the broader community. In addition, emotion regulation has importance to people with psychological problems. Difficulties with emotion regulation are thought to be a core cause of psychopathology, and in particular, of affective disorders like depression and anxiety (Kring & Sloan, 2009). Psychological disorders represent a major challenge globally, and particularly in Europe, where 27% of the adult population report that they have experienced a psychological disorder in the past year (World Health Organization Europe, 2012). Emotion regulation is clearly important, but before this project was conducted, there were two key limitations in the existing research that needed to be addressed. First, most existing emotion regulation research characterized the strategies people used to regulate their emotion as being either “good” or “bad”. However, we believed that this is a simplification: we proposed that in order to understand effective emotion regulation, it was necessary to understand who is using what strategy when. Sometimes strategies that are effective in one situation are harmful in another situation. We suggested that it was important to better understand this variation, and to do this, we wanted to understand how context shaped the ways in which people regulated their emotion. Second, most of the work on emotion regulation was based on laboratory experiments or questionnaires asking people what they usually did. These studies did not take the context into account. In the real world, the context you are in is constantly changing, and the emotion regulation strategies that work best are likely to change with it. Thus, we decided it was important to investigate emotion regulation in daily life. To do this, we used experience-sampling methods, sending people into the real world with smartphones and having them report back to us on what they were doing and how they were regulating their emotions. Thus, in this project, we examined contextual factors, like who you are with, what your goals are, and the situation you are in. Our key objective was to understand how these factors shaped which emotion regulation strategies people used, and whether these strategies were effective or not.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз