Creative and depressive profiles shape divergent thinking in emotion regulation idea generation

Area of Science:

• Psychology
• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Mental Health Research

Background:

• Emotion regulation (ER) is complex, with its generative aspect (creating regulatory techniques) being understudied.
• Existing research lacks a deep understanding of how individuals generate situation-specific emotion regulation strategies.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the generative component of emotion regulation by evaluating ER repertoires.
• To examine the influence of creative ability and depression symptoms on the generation of emotion regulation techniques.

Main Methods:

• Developed a novel task (ERGen) to assess ER technique generation in an online adult sample (N=143).
• Utilized human raters and GPT-4o to code 7854 generated techniques into 14 regulatory strategies.
• Modeled repertoire richness (strategy diversity) and size (technique count).

Main Results:

• Higher creativity correlated with more prolific technique generation across diverse strategies.
• Depression symptoms were associated with altered generation within specific strategies and reduced flexibility in ER tendencies.
• Creative individuals generated a wider variety and larger number of emotion regulation techniques.

Conclusions:

• Individual differences in creativity significantly impact the breadth and depth of emotion regulation technique generation.
• Depression symptoms uniquely shape the landscape of emotion regulation strategy selection and flexibility.
• Findings suggest divergent-thinking ability is a key factor in emotion regulation and a potential target for interventions in affective disorders.