Exploring reasons why people do not regulate their emotions

Research to date focuses on how people regulate their emotions, but more commonly, people do not regulate. We built a bottom-up taxonomy of reasons for investigating why. In Study 1a (N = 250 U.K. community members; collected in 2023) people who did not regulate during a recent stressful event were asked to describe their reasons. We established a list of 14 reasons, and a new sample rated their agreement (Study 1b, N = 248, United Kingdom; 2023). Study 2 (N = 326, Australia; 2024) investigated reason frequency in everyday life using experience sampling. Our studies were conducted in English among people residing in the United Kingdom and Australia; thus, our claims are relevant to these contexts. The most common reasons for not regulating under stress (Studies 1a and 1b) were believing one's feelings were valid, not wanting to make things worse, and feeling there was nothing one could do in the situation. The most common reasons for not regulating in daily life (Study 2) were believing one's feelings were valid and that regulating did not cross one's mind. In Studies 1b and 2, we tested reason endorsement based on affect intensity. For people with greater negative affect (Study 1b), and times with greater than usual negative affect (Study 2), people consistently did not initiate emotion regulation because they did not know how. Practically, this work highlights new avenues for intervening to foster emotion regulation, if and when regulation is desired. Theoretically, this work highlights the importance of studying emotion regulation as a process that is-and importantly, is not-initiated. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).