Adaptiveness of emotion regulation flexibility according to long-term implications

The ability to consider the long-term implications of emotional events is integral to mental health and adaptive psychological functioning. However, it remains unclear whether flexibly synchronizing emotion regulation strategies to the long-term implications of emotional events is associated with adaptive outcomes.

This ecological momentary assessment study examined how emotion regulation flexibility concerning contextual long-term implications is linked to daily emotional experiences and mental health outcomes. Ninety-eight participants provided 1705 real-time assessments of their perceived long-term implications of ongoing emotional events and reported their use of cognitive change (i.e., reappraisal, benefit-finding, perspective-taking) and attentional deployment strategies (i.e., distraction, refocusing, cognitive avoidance). The adaptiveness of adjusting these strategies based on contextual long-term implications was examined using momentary emotional experiences and measures of psychopathology and well-being as outcomes.

Consistent with models of emotion regulation flexibility, participants who aligned their use of cognitive change and attentional deployment strategies with the perceived long-term significance of events reported more positive daily emotional experiences and lower levels of psychopathology.

Future work should use experimental and longitudinal designs to establish causal pathways.

These findings underscore the importance of accounting for situational long-term implications when evaluating the adaptiveness of regulatory strategies, thereby adding to the growing body of evidence supporting the contextual nature of emotion regulation.