Variability is not flexibility: Emotion regulation switching predicts increased momentary distress when context is...

Area of Science:

• Psychology
• Clinical Psychology
• Computational Psychology

Background:

• Traditional views assumed universal adaptation of emotion regulation (ER) strategies.
• Recent research highlights the importance of ER flexibility, or fitting strategies to context.
• Existing studies often use ER variability as a proxy for flexibility, without directly assessing context.

Purpose of the Study:

• To directly assess the interaction between ER strategies and their eliciting context using a novel computational tool.
• To investigate whether ER effort scaling and strategy switching predict momentary distress based on context stability.
• To challenge the use of ER variability as a proxy for flexibility.

Main Methods:

• Employed a daily diary study (N=92) and an ecological momentary assessment study (N=158).
• Applied the Bray-Curtis dissimilarity index to quantify changes between ER and context profiles.
• Examined ER effort scaling (endorsement changes) and strategy switching (replacement changes).

Main Results:

• Greater moment-to-moment strategy switching predicted higher negative affect in stable contexts (Study 1).
• Increased strategy switching was associated with higher momentary psychopathology symptoms when context was stable (Study 2).
• ER variability did not accurately reflect flexibility when context was not directly assessed.

Conclusions:

• Directly assessing context is crucial for evaluating true emotion regulation flexibility.
• The findings challenge the common practice of using strategy variability as a proxy for flexibility.
• Prioritizing rigorous context assessment is essential for advancing clinical science in ER research.