Abstract
Recent research has investigated how adaptive emotion regulation (ER) strategies and maladaptive ER strategies interact to predict symptoms, but little is known about how specific strategies interact with one another when used in daily life. The present investigation used daily diary data collected over two weeks from an unselected student sample (N = 109) to examine how reappraisal, a putatively adaptive ER strategy, interacts on a given occasion (within-person) and across occasions (between-person) with putatively maladaptive ER strategies (rumination, experiential avoidance, expressive suppression) to predict daily depression and social anxiety symptoms. Results revealed between-person interactions of reappraisal with rumination and experiential avoidance, wherein reappraisal was most negatively related to symptoms for individuals who frequently used rumination and experiential avoidance. There was a similar within-person interaction between reappraisal and expressive suppression. Implications for assessing daily and retrospective ER are discussed, as well as future directions for studying ER in daily life.
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Notes
Emotion regulation strategies that are generally positively associated with psychological symptoms and other negative outcomes are often referred to as “maladaptive,” whereas those that are associated with greater well-being or fewer symptoms are often referred to as “adaptive” (e.g., Aldao et al. 2010). We follow this convention for ease of communication, though we acknowledge that the outcome of a given strategy is variable and dependent upon context, and we return to this point in the “Discussion”.
There were no differences in ethnicity between those who declined participation in the daily diary study and those who were included in analyses. However, males were more likely to decline participation (χ2 = 14.351, df = 1, p < .001) and individuals who participated in the daily diary study reported significantly higher depression [t (196.28) = − 2.03, p = .043] and social anxiety symptoms [t (286) = − 2.07, p = .04] during their lab visit than those who declined participation.
The other emotion regulation strategies assessed were acceptance, behavioral avoidance, distraction, procrastination, reflection, savoring, social support, and substance use. We did not assess interactions of reappraisal with all available maladaptive responses to emotions due to concerns about inflated Type I error rates in this relatively small sample with exploratory analyses. Rather, we selected three maladaptive responses a priori that are most frequently studied and show consistent, strong associations with psychopathology.
For all models, we also ran analyses including gender and ethnicity as covariates. Including these variables did not substantively change the main results, so we present the results from the more parsimonious models excluding demographic covariates.
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We are grateful to John Roberts for his helpful feedback on previous drafts of this manuscript.
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Tierney P. McMahon and Kristin Naragon-Gainey declares that they have no conflict of interest.
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McMahon, T.P., Naragon-Gainey, K. The Moderating Effect of Maladaptive Emotion Regulation Strategies on Reappraisal: A Daily Diary Study. Cogn Ther Res 42, 552–564 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10608-018-9913-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10608-018-9913-x