Distinguishing Emotion Regulation Success in Daily Life From Maladaptive Regulation and Dysregulation

Abstract

Academic Abstract

This paper aims to motivate research on emotion regulation success in naturalistic settings. We define emotion regulation success as achieving one’s emotion regulation goal and differentiate it from related concepts (i.e., maladaptive regulation and dysregulation). As goals vary across individuals and situations, it is insufficient to conceptualize emotion regulation success as maximizing positive affect and minimizing negative affect. Instead, emotion regulation success can be measured through novel approaches targeting the achievement of emotion regulation goals. In addition to utilizing novel data analytic tools (e.g., response surface analyses), future research can make use of informant reports and observing ambulatory behavior or physiology. Considering emotion regulation goals when measuring daily emotion regulation success has the potential to answer key questions about personality, development, and mental health.

Public Abstract

People differ in how they want to feel in daily situations (e.g., excited) and why they want to feel that way (e.g., to make others feel better), depending on factors such as culture or age. Although people manage their emotions to reach these goals, most research assessing emotion regulation success has not taken individual goals into account. When assessing if people successfully regulate their emotions, most research in daily life has been focused on whether people feel more positive or less negative. To help study emotion regulation success in a more thoughtful and inclusive way, we propose a new approach to conceptualizing emotion regulation success that incorporates individual differences in what motivates people to regulate and discuss future research directions and applications.

Keywords

emotion research methods well-being motivation/goals self-regulation

Emotion regulation plays an important role in preserving mental (Aldao et al., 2010) and physical health (DeSteno et al., 2013; Isasi et al., 2013), for positive close relationships (Campos et al., 2011; English & Eldesouky, 2020b; Gottman & Levenson, 1992; Lopes et al., 2005), and academic (Hoffmann et al., 2020) and professional success (Fisk & Friesen, 2012; Grandey, 2000). Emotion regulation descended from a rich research tradition on coping (Folkman & Lazarus, 1980; Troy et al., 2023). Emotion regulation differs from coping; however, in that it is both narrower in scope and encompasses aspects not typically included in coping. First, emotion regulation only encompasses actions that are taken to achieve emotional goals and typically happens at a shorter time scale, compared to coping that might refer to overall adjustment processes (e.g., coping with the adjustment to college or the loss of one’s spouse). Therefore, it is possible for someone to successfully cope with a larger stressor without necessarily regulating their emotions successfully at the moment, as coping could involve non-emotion-focused strategies. In addition, emotion regulation encompasses processes that are not considered coping, such as regulating behavioral expression or physiological components of emotions or influencing one’s positive emotions (Gross, 1999). In line with the tradition in coping research of studying maladaptive and adaptive strategies (e.g., Carver et al., 1989), emotion regulation researchers previously operated under the assumption that certain strategies are more effective than others, based on early work documenting differential success of strategies in laboratory contexts (e.g., cognitive reappraisal versus expressive suppression; Gross, 1998).

Despite a dramatic increase in naturalistic emotion regulation research (Koval et al., 2020), researchers have mostly focused on studying the frequency of using strategies in daily life that were deemed more effective based on laboratory settings, such as cognitive reappraisal (McRae, 2013). However, recent shifts in emotion regulation research have emphasized the importance of not simply relying on ideas about the proposed effectiveness of strategies in isolation, but also acknowledging their dependence on the situation and the regulator (Doré et al., 2016; Greenaway et al., 2018). The notion of context-dependence of emotion regulation strategies has prompted researchers to emphasize the importance of flexibly adjusting one’s emotion regulation strategies to contextual demands rather than just using more putatively adaptive and less putatively maladaptive strategies (Aldao et al., 2015). These advances in thinking about strategies suggest a need for new perspectives on how to measure whether individuals are successful at regulating their emotions in daily life and how regulation success relates to life outcomes—going beyond the idea of strategy frequency and mean levels of emotion as proxies for successful emotion regulation.

Focusing on emotion regulation success in naturalistic settings could help answer pressing questions about psychopathology (e.g., are individuals with depression less successful at regulating their emotions?), physical health (e.g., is successful emotion regulation predictive of health decision making?), or development (e.g., are older adults more successful at regulating their emotions?). In laboratory experiments, emotion regulation can be studied in standardized situations while providing participants with explicit regulation goals (e.g., “decrease your negative emotional experience”). However, in daily life, participants experience a variety of different situational demands and regulation goals. Studying emotion regulation in daily situations and regarding different regulatory goals therefore increases external validity and enables us to draw conclusions about the dynamic nature of emotion regulation.

We define emotion regulation success based on the effectiveness of one’s regulation efforts and distinguish emotion regulation success from related terms. While one’s ability to regulate emotions (or emotion regulation capacity) is theoretically linked to emotion regulation success in daily life, we discuss important distinctions between these concepts. We highlight how integrating emotion goals and emotion regulation motives (for simplicity, jointly referred to as emotion regulation goals; for definitions and examples, see Table 1) into the conceptualization of emotion regulation success can substantively advance understanding of emotion regulation. Importantly, we focus on a definition of emotion regulation success for efforts that involve the conscious activation of a goal, as thus far to our knowledge no robust methodological approaches exist that differentiate the activation of unconscious regulation goals from instances in which no goal to regulate one’s emotions is present. In addition, we propose ways that novel measurement and modeling approaches can be utilized to assess emotion regulation success in daily life and highlight implications for future research.

Table 1.

Definition of Emotion Regulation Goals (i.e., Emotion Goals and Emotion Regulation Motives).

Term	Definition	Examples
Emotion Goal	The emotion an individual wants to feel or express when they regulate	- To feel more positive or less negative - To feel sad - To look happy
Emotion Regulation Motive	The superordinate reason an individual engages in regulation	- Hedonic - Instrumental ○ Performance ○ Impression Management ○ Pro-Social ○ Self-Verification

Note. Emotion regulation motives based on Eldesouky and English (2019) and Tamir (2016).

Positionality, Citations, and Constraints on Generality Statements

The authors of this work are from Germany and the United States and the cited works include studies that were also predominantly conducted in the United States or in Western European countries. We hope that taking a more nuanced approach to studying emotion regulation success will enable research that is sensitive to cultural differences in emotion regulation beyond the United States and Western Europe. However, as the empirical research that is foundational to this paper has mostly been conducted in the United States and in Western Europe, the current reasoning might not apply if approaching research on emotion regulation from different cultural perspectives and the generality of our definition of emotion regulation success across different cultures should be explicitly tested before assuming its universality.

What Is Emotion Regulation Success?

Emotion regulation refers to attempts to influence which emotions one has, when one has them, and how one experiences or expresses these emotions (Gross, 1998). Emotion regulation is a goal-driven process, as the defining feature of emotion regulation is the activation of a goal to influence the trajectory of one’s emotions (Gross, 2015; Tamir, 2021). In some cases, this goal can be the desired emotion itself, like feeling less sadness or more happiness. In other instances, the desired emotion is only a means for achieving an overarching instrumental motive, like feeling less sadness so that one can focus on completing a meaningful task or feeling more happiness so that one can help a friend celebrate their success.

The emotion regulation process occurs in three different stages. First, one identifies the need to regulate and sets a regulation goal. Second, one selects a strategy (e.g., cognitive reappraisal) to achieve one’s goal. Third, the strategy is implemented and monitored for any necessary adjustments. As our definition of emotion regulation success requires that a goal was set to regulate one’s emotions, success can be described broadly by successful strategy selection and implementation. However, one could also consider success at a specific stage (e.g., successfully setting a specific regulation goal or successfully implementing a specific strategy in daily life). Importantly, this definition of emotion regulation success distinguishes momentary success from one’s general capacity (i.e., ability to regulate in a way that one’s emotion regulation goal is achieved when prompted) or emotion regulation self-efficacy (i.e., one’s confidence in one’s general capacity to regulate one’s emotions successfully). While an individual may have the capability to be a good regulator, they may fail to successfully manage their emotions in daily life because of difficulty setting or pursuing emotion regulation goals (e.g., due to lack of motivation).

Importantly, our definition of emotion regulation success allows for instances in which emotion regulation is used for purposes other than immediate hedonic pleasure. When individuals are asked about the reasons they regulate their emotions, people often describe wanting to downregulate negative emotions like anger, sadness, or anxiety (Gross et al., 2006) or wanting to upregulate positive emotions such as love, interest, and joy (Quoidbach et al., 2010). This is in line with the idea that people in general pursue hedonic goals—people want to feel pleasure and avoid pain (Larsen, 2000). However, to feel pleasure and avoid pain in the long run, individuals also choose to regulate their emotions in ways that may not serve to maximize pleasure and minimize pain in the moment. This type of regulation in which short-term pleasure of the experience is not the central motivation is also referred to as instrumental emotion regulation (Tamir, 2016).

As prohedonic emotion regulation is the most common motive of regulation (Larsen, 2000; Quoidbach et al., 2010) and contrahedonic regulation is relatively more infrequent on average (e.g., English et al., 2017), one might think that it is not necessary to account for instances of contrahedonic regulation when measuring success. However, contrahedonic regulation is more common for some people than for others (e.g., people lower in agreeableness or conscientiousness; Eldesouky & English, 2019), and it is important to assess individual differences in emotion regulation by taking a comprehensive approach that includes contrahedonic goals. Our definition of emotion regulation success can also provide important insights for prohedonic regulation. Even if individuals have hedonic goals, people vary in (a) the intensity to which they want to experience positive emotions and (b) which emotions they would like to feel in general and in specific situations. For example, some people tend to want to feel excitement, whereas others want to feel calm or content (Tsai et al., 2006). Our definition of emotion regulation success accounts for potential differences in the extent to which the regulator would like to feel specific positive and negative emotions rather than assuming that the goal is to maximize the experience of positive affect or minimize the experience of negative affect more broadly.

While observing someone experience and express negative emotions, such as sadness and anger, could be interpreted as them failing to regulate their emotions, it is important to consider whether the emotional state is desired by the individual. From a goal-focused perspective, the presence of negative emotions can be considered successful emotion regulation if they represent the states that the individual would like to achieve or maintain. Defining emotion regulation success as achieving one’s emotion regulation goals parallels theoretical conceptualizations within the field of self-regulation in which self-regulatory success refers to acting in accordance with one’s goals (Ajzen, 1991), independent of goal content. Rather than assuming successful self-regulation refers to following prescriptive norms and pursuing specific goals and that, for example, self-defeating behaviors (e.g., substance use, overeating, risky sexual behavior) represent self-regulatory failure, goals and behaviors are regarded with respect to the functions they fulfill for the individual (Kopetz & Orehek, 2015).

Finally, in studying emotion regulation success, one must delineate how exactly it manifests. To achieve one’s emotion goal or motives, emotion regulation can target any of the three components of emotion: subjective experience, expression, and physiological correlates (Gross, 2015). Hence, once someone’s emotion regulation goals are known, whether emotions are successfully regulated can be assessed by asking people about their subjective experience (e.g., Bigman et al., 2016; Gutentag et al., 2017; Opitz et al., 2014), by observing their behavioral expression (Bonanno et al., 2004; Côté et al., 2010; Opitz et al., 2014), or by monitoring changes in physiology (Balzarotti et al., 2017; Opitz et al., 2014; Troy et al., 2018). Recent work suggests that emotion goals can also be specific to certain components of emotions, for example to the expression of one’s emotion (Greenaway et al., 2021; Greenaway & Kalokerinos, 2019). That is, individuals distinguish between wanting to regulate the experience of their emotions (e.g., wanting to feel happier) and the expression of their emotions (e.g., wanting to appear happier). Accordingly, emotion regulation success can be conceptualized with regard to specific components of emotion. If expressing less positive emotion is the goal, for example, then asking individuals about their emotion experience does not provide useful information about their emotion regulation success. Instead, observing expressive behavior for indicators of amusement (or lack thereof) would be more informative in that case (e.g., the successful stifle of a laugh during a meeting irrespective of one’s internal experience of amusement).

To summarize, successful emotion regulation constitutes the attainment of an emotion regulation goal, indicated either by the desired emotional state itself or someone’s overarching motive, and successful emotion regulation can be differentiated from one’s capacity to regulate or one’s regulatory self-efficacy. Given that emotion regulation can be motivated by instrumental motives, momentary emotion regulation success cannot be defined simply as maximizing the experience of pleasure and minimizing pain, or by experiencing emotions that are normatively considered adaptive. In addition, as emotions contain experiential, expressive, and physiological components, emotion regulation success can theoretically present itself at any of these levels depending on the regulator’s specific goal.

Emotion Regulation Goal Achievement as Emotion Regulation Success

Emotion regulation is goal-driven, meaning that when people regulate their emotions, they do so to feel a certain way (e.g., feel happy) or to not feel a certain way (e.g., feel less anxious; Gross, 2015). In this section, we will discuss why it is essential to account for individual and situational differences in emotion regulation goals (i.e., emotion goals and superordinate emotion regulation motives) when assessing emotion regulation success. In addition, we will differentiate emotion regulation success from other concepts that touch on emotion regulation effectiveness, namely emotion dysregulation and (mal)adaptive regulation. Figure 1 presents an overview of the conceptualization of emotion regulation success presented in the following sections.

Figure 1

Separating Emotion Regulation Success From Maladaptive Emotion Regulation and Dysregulation.

Individual and Situational Differences in Emotion Regulation Goals

How people want to feel (i.e., their emotion goals) and why they want to manage their emotions (i.e., their emotion regulation motives) are driven by both what the person is generally like and the situations that the person is in. These person- and situation-based differences have implications for how we think about emotion regulation success.

Emotion Goals

A growing body of research has shown that there are differences in the emotional goals that individuals generally pursue. For example, cultural background and age have been shown to impact one’s emotional goals (e.g., Scheibe et al., 2013; Tsai, 2017).

Extensive research on ideal affect (i.e., how one would generally like to feel) has shown that individuals from different cultural backgrounds vary in how much they aim to feel different valence-and-arousal-based components of emotions (Tsai, 2017). On average, European Americans would like to feel more high-arousal positive (HAP) emotional states (e.g., high levels of excitement) whereas Asians and Asian Americans prefer to feel more low-arousal positive (LAP) emotional states (e.g., high levels of calmness; Tsai et al., 2006). Compared to individuals from Russia (Chentsova-Dutton et al., 2021) and Germany (Koopmann-Holm & Tsai, 2014), U.S. Americans also aim to experience lower levels of negative emotions (e.g., less sadness). In addition, U.S. Americans differ from each other in how desirable they rate positive or negative emotions, with, for example, People of Latino Heritage rating negative emotions as less appropriate to experience than People of European Heritage (Senft et al., 2021). The personal values that individuals across cultures endorse (Schwartz et al., 2012) also guide which emotions they want to feel. For example, people who more highly value self-transcendence (e.g., benevolence) want to feel more empathy and compassion, whereas people who more highly value self-enhancement (e.g., power) want to feel more anger and pride (Tamir et al., 2016).

There are also age differences in the emotions that people would like to feel. Theories of adult development propose that as individuals age, they focus more on socioemotional goals (Carstensen et al., 1999) and try to avoid high arousal states which are particularly taxing (Charles, 2010). Consistent with these ideas, experience sampling work has found that older adults tend to be more motivated than younger adults to regulate their daily emotions in a way that they experience less negative or more positive emotions (Riediger et al., 2009). In terms of specific emotion goals, older adults show a stronger preference to feel LAP more so than HAP emotions compared to younger adults (Scheibe et al., 2013).

These research findings on emotion goals have several implications for the conceptualization of emotion regulation success. First, they indicate that using overall positive and negative affect as indicators of emotion regulation success obscures potential differences in the types of positive affect (e.g., low arousal versus high arousal) people would like to feel. Second, the commonly held assumption that minimal levels of negative affect indicate emotion regulation success is often rooted within cultural frameworks that emphasize striving for very low levels of negative affect, which might not be a universal goal. Finally, individuals can differ in the specific emotions they would like to feel (e.g., compassion, anger, and sadness) indicating that even assessing emotions based on valence and arousal might not fully capture whether someone regulated their emotions successfully. Instead, assessing whether specific emotion goals (e.g., feeling angrier) were achieved, as opposed to more general affect goals (e.g., feeling more high-arousal negative emotions), may better capture emotion regulation success.

Emotion Regulation Motives

Emotions are also regulated for the purpose of superordinate goals, often referred to as emotion regulation motives (Tamir, 2016). While individuals frequently report regulating purely for the sake of wanting to feel good (English et al., 2017), it is also common for individuals to endorse instrumental emotion regulation motives in which the emotions they strive to feel serve another purpose (Kalokerinos et al., 2017). For example, the day before giving a presentation, you might want to maintain some nervousness to motivate yourself to prepare extensively.

Both person-related and situational components can help explain why people are motivated to engage in emotion regulation. In terms of individual differences, recent research has emphasized that between-person factors (e.g., what someone is like in general) explain more variability in hedonic and pro-social motivation to engage in emotion regulation than previously assumed (Wilms et al., 2021). As one example, personality traits are associated with individuals’ general emotion regulation motives (Eldesouky & English, 2019). Individuals higher in agreeableness report wanting to more frequently regulate their emotions to make other people feel good and maintain relationships with them. Individuals higher in openness more frequently engage in emotion regulation to perform well on tasks, and individuals higher in neuroticism tend to regulate their emotions more frequently with the purpose of making a good impression on others. Age also impacts individuals’ superordinate goals. As individuals progress through life, they increasingly prioritize emotional goals that can be realized in the moment over longer-term goals (Carstensen et al., 1999). As a result of this age-related motivational shift, older adults may be more likely to regulate their emotions for hedonic rather than instrumental reasons.

In terms of situational factors, people’s motives have been shown to vary across contexts in their day-to-day life (English et al., 2017). Daily affordances influence what motivates individuals to engage in emotion regulation. For example, when emotions are thought to be caused by others, people are more likely to regulate in order to help their social relationships (Kalokerinos et al., 2017). Person-by-situation interactions can also impact the motives individuals report. For example, similar affordances (e.g., a competitive situation) can lead to individuals having different motivations to engage with their emotions. One study found that athletes who think anger is a useful emotion for a competitive situation choose to upregulate anger in competitive situations, whereas athletes who think anger is not useful in competitions choose to downregulate it (Lane et al., 2011).

These findings on emotion regulation motives have several implications for the conceptualization of emotion regulation success. First, emotion regulation is not purely hedonic, in which case assuming individuals want to attain emotional states just for the sake of experiencing those emotions is not accurate. Second, individuals differ in how frequently they hold certain non-hedonic (i.e., instrumental) motives, so comparing individuals’ emotion regulation outcomes while disregarding their motives can yield misleading results. Third, situational demands impact motives, so holding a purely individual difference perspective on success (e.g., based on motives individuals aim to attain in general) is limited in assessing whether individuals are successful at regulating their emotions in the moment.

Distinguishing Unsuccessful From Maladaptive Emotion Regulation and Dysregulation

In addition to accounting for individual and situational differences in emotion regulation goals (i.e., emotion goals and superordinate emotion regulation motives), it is essential to conceptually distinguish emotion regulation success from other prevalent concepts regarding emotion regulation. Specifically, we highlight how emotion dysregulation and maladaptive emotion regulation are distinct from lack of emotion regulation success.

Emotion Dysregulation

Failure to engage in emotion regulation efforts and emotion misregulation (i.e., using strategies that are not well-suited for the situation; Gross & Jazaieri, 2014) have previously been referred to as emotion dysregulation. Emotion regulation success can be seen as embedded within the broader framework of emotion dysregulation (see Figure 1), but emotion regulation success as defined in this paper is distinct from emotion dysregulation. The failure to engage in emotion regulation efforts does not differentiate between moments in which individuals hold an emotion regulation goal and moments in which individuals do not perceive the need to regulate. For example, someone might feel high levels of anxiety and set the goal to feel less anxious but fail to engage in active efforts to reduce their anxiety. In this case, this person would not be successful at regulating their emotion and would also be considered as having dysregulated emotions. However, if the person did not set a goal to reduce their anxiety, their lack of emotion regulation effort (or high levels of anxiety) is not indicative of low emotion regulation success, even though they might be perceived as exhibiting dysregulated emotions.

We are situating emotion regulation success within this larger dysregulation framework but see it as unique in that success requires the activation of an emotion regulation goal. It is possible for individuals to be perceived as dysregulated and yet show what we would consider emotion regulation success.

Maladaptive Emotion Regulation

We define maladaptive (i.e., not serving or impeding someone’s overall strivings) emotion regulation as instances in which maladaptive emotion goals or motives are achieved. In Figure 1, this is shown with maladaptive emotion regulation as an additional, evaluative, step that asks the question of whether the emotion regulation goal is adaptive for the situation.

For example, someone might want to win an argument and therefore upregulate their anger. Even though they win the argument, the display of anger might be off-putting to others. One could argue that the social cost of expressing anger has negative consequences for the person and is context-inappropriate, but it is important to consider that this issue arises from potential maladaptive motive setting but not unsuccessful emotion regulation.

Even if emotion regulation motives are satisfied and emotion goals are attained, the motives or goals themselves might be maladaptive for the individual (i.e., associated with adjustment difficulties or lower well-being). In a recent framework describing the role of effort in emotion regulation, Tamir (2021) points out that individuals might set regulation goals that are either too easy or too difficult to attain. For example, emotion regulation goals may seem less attainable and effort may seem more costly when people are experiencing unpleasant emotions compared to when they are experiencing pleasant emotions. People can be successful by only striving to feel a little less anger when they are in a full-on rage, but setting this easy goal will not ultimately be helpful unless they keep making adjustments to their goal. Similarly, if people aim to completely reduce their anger this goal might be hard to achieve and lack of achieving the goal might cause increased negative emotions.

As defined, emotion regulation success is indicated by achieving a set emotion goal. Even though it has been argued that emotion goals can be implicit (Koole et al., 2015), assuming someone has implicit emotion goals or emotion regulation motives might lead to drawing misguided conclusions. For example, if a person is characterized as failing at emotion regulation when they express anger in a conflict and thereby escalate the conflict, this assumes that the person either did not want to feel or express anger or that they were motivated to regulate their emotions to avoid conflict. However, this assumption might be incorrect and therefore conflating the success of emotion regulation with the adaptiveness of one’s momentary emotion expression. Studying implicit emotion regulation success is possible if future methodological advancements in measuring implicit emotion regulation goals can enable us to distinguish moments in which implicit goals are activated from moments in which individuals are not aiming to regulate their emotions.

To summarize, while maladaptive emotion regulation can encompass unsuccessful regulation, these concepts can also be meaningfully distinguished. Specifically, emotion regulation success captures whether individuals satisfy their emotion regulation motives or achieve their emotion goals, while agnostic to the function of the emotion regulation outcome more broadly. Maladaptive emotion regulation, however, captures whether the motives that individuals achieve have negative consequences for the individual. Differentiating between (lack of) success and (mal)adaptiveness of emotion regulation can help identify key questions about emotion regulation in healthy individuals and individuals with affective disorders.

How Has Emotion Regulation Success Been Measured in Daily Life?

Most studies that have explicitly targeted the question of emotion regulation success have been conducted in laboratory settings (McRae, 2013) in which participants are instructed to regulate their emotions using a specific strategy to achieve a specific hedonic goal, for example: “use reappraisal to reduce your negative emotions.” In this example, emotion regulation success can be defined as the significant reduction of negative affect measured through self-reported target affect (e.g., negative emotions after regulating), physiology (e.g., change in heart rate), or facial expressions (e.g., no frowning). Lab experiments have been criticized for their lack of generalizability to everyday situations, often using standardized stimuli that do not elicit states comparable to daily life (Northcott et al., 2021).

To assess naturalistic, everyday thoughts, feelings, and behavior, we can make use of ambulatory assessment methodology. These methods allow researchers to study individuals (1) in their natural settings, (2) in real-time (or close to real-time), and (3) on repeated occasions (Conner & Mehl, 2015). Whereas individuals are rarely able to spontaneously choose emotion regulation strategies in the laboratory (c.f., Growney & English, 2023), studies of daily life allow individuals to set their own emotion regulation goals and freely use any available strategies. Measures of emotion regulation strategies in daily life are also less biased by ideas about the self and recollection biases than global trait reports of emotion regulation (Koval et al., 2022; Robinson & Clore, 2002). In daily life, individuals are regulating in response to environmental stimuli that are personally relevant, increasing ecological validity. But how can emotion regulation success be gauged under these unstandardized conditions?

The most frequent measure of whether emotion regulation strategies are implemented successfully in daily life is the extent to which individuals show decreases in self-reported negative emotions (Brans et al., 2013; Kalokerinos et al., 2019; Lennarz et al., 2019; Nezlek & Kuppens, 2008; Wenzel et al., 2021), increases in self-reported positive emotions (Brans et al., 2013; Nezlek & Kuppens, 2008; Wenzel et al., 2021), or lower negative (Koval et al., 2022) and higher positive (Livingstone & Srivastava, 2012) self-reported emotions in general. While researchers have acknowledged that these measures present imperfect indicators of successful emotion regulation implementation (Koval et al., 2022), it is useful to highlight the assumptions underlying this approach. Operationalizing emotion regulation success as someone’s average positive or negative affect in comparison to someone else’s average positive or average negative affect (a between-person approach) assumes that individuals have comparable hedonic goals (e.g., pleasure is maximized for everyone if they feel very excited or joyful, and not at all anxious or sad). This is a problematic assumption as there are between-person differences in how individuals ideally like to feel (Riediger et al., 2009; Tsai et al., 2006). Individuals also differ in how reactive they are to everyday stimuli (Hisler et al., 2020), and it is difficult to parse apart whether, for example, individuals with higher levels of negative affect are less successful at regulating their emotions or are simply more reactive (Wirth et al., 2021).

Within-person differences in positive and negative affect (i.e., how much more positive or how much less negative does the person feel in the moment relative to their average affect) can inform us about changes in one’s affect beyond differences in emotion goals or between-person differences in reactivity. However, examining within-person differences in momentary emotions to learn about someone’s emotion regulation success still assumes that across individuals, maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain is the only goal for emotion regulation. While research has shown that people often endorse prohedonic goals (Gross et al., 2006; Quoidbach et al., 2010), people also regulate their momentary emotions contrahedonically (e.g., dampening positive emotions; English et al., 2017). Emotion regulation motives are also more complex than just wanting to feel good or bad. Work on instrumental motives shows that people often manage their emotions because they want to perform well on a task, maintain relationships, learn about themselves, or grow as a person (Kalokerinos et al., 2017). Imagine someone receiving positive feedback at work on the same day their friend is laid off. If this person is motivated to maintain a positive relationship with their friend, they might choose to dampen the positive emotions they feel about their own achievement. If we followed the traditional approach of considering positive momentary affect to be the indicator of emotion regulation success during this regulation episode, then this would incorrectly suggest that they were not particularly successful at regulating their emotion.

Emotion dynamics (Hamaker et al., 2015) have been suggested as useful indicators of emotion regulation success due to their ability to pick up on change processes in emotions and account for individual differences in emotion goals (Hoeksma et al., 2004). In particular, emotion variability and inertia have been proposed as indicators of emotion regulation success. While both emotion variability and inertia are concerned with the change in emotion experience as opposed to average levels of emotions, they differ with regard to their theoretical conception and measurement. Though seemingly paradoxical, emotion variability captures the degree to which subjectively reported emotions are unstable, potentially indicating context-inappropriate fluctuations, while emotional inertia captures one’s (in)ability to change one’s emotional experience from one time point to the next. Emotion variability is defined as how much individuals deviate from their average levels of positive or negative emotions over a period of time, indicated for example by the standard deviation of one’s negative emotions (e.g., Trull et al., 2008). While individuals might have different preferences for how much they want to avoid feeling angry in general, the variability in someone’s anger (i.e., how much they deviate from their average level of anger over time) could indicate how (un)successful they are at regulating. Following this logic, studies have considered variability of emotions in daily life as indicative of difficulties with emotion regulation (e.g., Trull et al., 2008). To illustrate, someone whose anger fluctuates more in daily life is potentially less successful at regulating their emotions than someone whose anger does not fluctuate as much. Emotional inertia is the predictability of one’s emotions from one time point to the next or their resistance to change, indicated for example by the correlation between emotions from one point to the next (Koval et al., 2015). Regardless of one’s level of anger, higher levels of inertia in daily life could, for example, indicate someone’s inability to return their initially context-appropriate anger levels back to their individual baseline or one’s inability to enact change in anger when it is desired because anger is stuck at the same level, indicating less successful regulation of anger. Both high variability and high inertia can indicate emotion regulation difficulties because they reflect emotions being out of control—either through fluctuating too much (variability) or through being unable to be changed (inertia).

While emotion dynamics offer exciting opportunities to regard emotion regulation as a dynamic process, there are caveats to consider as well. Emotion dynamics are mostly used as between-person indicators (e.g., Dejonckheere et al., 2019). As such, it should be critically considered how much information they provide beyond mean level differences. Recent work has shown that while individual differences in simple measures of emotion variability (e.g., SD) are uniquely associated with personality (Wendt et al., 2020) and well-being (Dejonckheere et al., 2019), more complex emotion dynamics (e.g., emotional inertia) often show redundancies with mean levels of emotion in predicting individual differences. Even though emotion variability uniquely contributes to well-being beyond mean levels of emotions, it is difficult to interpret emotion variability without considering contextual factors (i.e., sources of the variability; English & Eldesouky, 2020a) that can inform why individuals vary in their emotions over time. In terms of emotion regulation success, this means that emotion variability cannot in and out of itself speak to whether individuals’ emotions vary due to momentary goals to adapt one’s emotions. Similarly, emotional inertia does not consider whether or not the maintenance of emotional states from one time point to the next might be desirable or even useful to individuals in particular contexts (e.g., when wanting to maintain anger in light of an upcoming confrontation).

Based on these limitations of the current ways of assessing emotion regulation success through mean levels of positive and negative emotion and through between-person indicators of emotion dynamics such as emotion inertia and emotion variability, new measures of emotion regulation success need to be considered. In the next section, we will discuss how emotion goals and emotion regulation motives can be integrated into measures of emotion regulation success in daily life.

How Can We Measure Emotion Regulation Success in Daily Life?

Emotion regulation success in daily life is most often assessed through self-reports, but there is also utility in drawing on other data sources such as peer or informant reports, and ambulatory behavioral measures or physiology assessments. Below, we detail some of the ways in which methodological and statistical advances can be leveraged to measure emotion regulation success based on emotion regulation goal achievement using self-report measures of emotion regulation success (i.e., direct and indirect measures) and measures beyond self-reports (i.e., peer reports, ambulatory behavioral measures, and ambulatory physiological measures).

Using Self-Reports to Measure Emotion Regulation Success

Once individuals report the activation of an emotion regulation goal, self-reports can then also be used to assess whether the emotion regulation goal was attained. Self-reports of emotion regulation success in daily life can be obtained either through direct self-assessments of success or through self-reported emotions (McRae, 2013).

Direct Measures

First, we consider direct reports of someone’s emotion regulation success. Recent research has assessed emotion regulation success through self-reported perceptions of success using face-valid items (e.g., “how successful were you at managing your negative emotions”; Wylie et al., 2022). Direct self-assessments of emotion goal satisfaction could also be useful. Individuals could be asked if they were successful at achieving the emotional state they wanted to achieve, either more generally phrased or regarding specific emotional goals (e.g., “How successful were you at maintaining your happiness?”). One downside of this approach, however, is that it requires precise insight into and monitoring of one’s goal achievement.

Asking instead about emotion regulation motives might be easier in certain situations. For example, one could ask about whether motives were attained in general (e.g., “Have you attained your goal in this social interaction?”; Wong et al., 2017) or more specifically (e.g., “did you make a positive impression on others?” when participants report regulating due to impression management motives). Note that for more specific motive satisfaction, it is necessary to determine whether a motive to regulate one’s emotions was held, to ensure that emotions were directed toward the achievement of this goal. While not explicitly assessing participants’ motives, a study on workplace interactions (Wong et al., 2017) documented that self-perceptions about whether motives were attained moderated the relationship between emotion regulation effort and momentary well-being. This finding implies that asking about motive achievement in conjunction with asking about regulatory attempts can provide information about emotion regulation success.

Validation of measures is necessary to assess whether self-reports of emotion regulation success actually capture emotion goal attainment or emotion regulation motive satisfaction, preferably in both controlled laboratory settings and naturalistic contexts. As asking about emotion regulation success directly might require people to think more abstractly about their goals, it could be beneficial to assess emotion regulation success in a more indirect way that does not require individuals themselves to decide whether they were successful.

Indirect Measures

Indirect assessments of emotion regulation success could potentially be captured through meta-emotions or dynamic measures of emotional experience. Meta-emotions could be used to assess how positive or negative people feel about their emotional state (Bailen et al., 2019) after reporting emotion regulation motives or goals. If people indicate that they feel positive about the emotions that they are feeling, one could infer that they do not perceive an additional need to regulate and have regulated successfully. This assumption is so far just speculative though and needs to be tested empirically. However, emerging research has shown that meta-emotional states are related to how much attention individuals pay to their emotions (Bailen et al., 2019), which might limit their utility as measures of emotion regulation success. An extensive body of research has shown that individuals differ with regard to how much they differentiate between emotions they are experiencing, with some people reporting they specifically feel sad, angry, or disappointed and others reporting overall more or less negative emotional states that show less distinct experiences (Thompson et al., 2021). However, no research thus far has determined how much people differentiate between their emotional goals (e.g., wanting to feel less angry versus wanting to feel less negative overall). Only assessing goals and goal satisfaction at a broad level (e.g., reducing negative emotions) could fail to capture nuances in individual emotion regulation attempts, whereas reporting on nuanced emotion goals could selectively disadvantage individuals with a lower ability to differentiate between emotions.

Unlike direct self-report of emotion regulation success, emotion goals and emotions have often been measured in daily life (and quite extensively in the case of emotions). However, it is still important to pay attention to the measurement, particularly when wanting to draw inferences based on within-person processes (e.g., whether people are more successful when they use reappraisal to regulate their emotions). Measures that are routinely used for assessing emotions in daily life are not designed for within-person comparison but rather rely on between-person factor structures (Brose et al., 2020). For example, while individuals who tend to feel angry more often could also tend to feel anxious more often, this does not mean that moments in which one feels more angry are moments in which one also feels more anxious. In parallel, some studies on emotion regulation strategy use show that factor structures can differ on the between- and within-person level (McMahon & Naragon-Gainey, 2019; c.f. Southward & Cheavens, 2020). To our knowledge, no study thus far has comprehensively validated measures of emotion goals in daily life. To assess whether individuals are more or less successful at attaining their emotion goals when they regulate their emotions (i.e., emotion regulation success), inferences have to be drawn based on measures of emotion and emotion goals that are valid indicators of between-person and within-person processes. Therefore, a priority of research into indirect measures of emotion regulation success should be to think carefully about how to measure emotion regulation goals and to consider whether and how people have conscious access to their emotion regulation goals.

Assuming that daily emotions and emotion goals are measured precisely, the match between emotion goals and emotion experience can be quantified as indicating emotion regulation success. Response surface methodology (RSA), which has been proposed as a more mathematically sound alternative to difference scores (Edwards, 2001), can be used to assess alignment between emotion goals and emotion experience. Response surfaces can provide answers to questions in which outcomes (e.g., well-being, social functioning) are predicted by how well someone’s goals and emotions match. They are well-suited to answer questions about the matching of two variables because they are less biased toward attributing effects to similarity in variables rather than the individual effects of said variables (for an introduction to RSA, see Humberg et al., 2019). On a between-person level, this concordance could be indicated by assessing how well one’s average affect over a period of time matches one’s ideal affect (see Scheibe et al., 2013 for a similar question using difference scores). On a within-person level, multilevel RSA (Nestler et al., 2019) could provide insight into moments in which individuals’ emotions are more or less matching their momentary emotion goals when regulating. The latter approach has been applied to assessing within-person variation in the matching of personality states with environmental demands (Kritzler et al., 2021).

Going Beyond Self-Report to Assess Emotion Regulation Success

Self-reports are essential to assessing emotion regulation success in our current definition as they allow for the individual to express their unique regulatory goals rather than assuming normative goals. There are several potential limitations of self-reports of emotion regulation success in its current form that indicate a potential for non-self-report measures to act as complements to previously reviewed approaches, namely lack of emotion awareness, self-presentation bias, and participant burden. Individuals vary in how clear they are about their emotion experience and how much attention they pay to their emotions, which impacts how much they report habitually engaging in emotion regulation (Boden & Thompson, 2015; Gratz & Roemer, 2004). Emotion regulation success as proposed would require a nuanced understanding of one’s emotions and emotional goals (e.g., am I feeling sad at one time point and am I feeling less sad at another time point), so individuals with lower levels of emotional awareness might be less able to report on how successfully they regulate their emotions. In addition, self-reports can be biased such that social desirability could make people less comfortable with reporting negative emotions or lack of emotion regulation success (Mauss & Robinson, 2009). Finally, as naturalistic self-report surveys can be burdensome for participants if they take a long time to fill out (Eisele et al., 2022), establishing measures of emotion regulation success that do not require self-reports could help ensure higher data quality and participant retention.

In addition to helping overcome weaknesses of self-report, non-self-report measures could be more precise measures of emotion regulation success in cases where emotion experience is not the primary target of regulation. Research suggests that individuals sometimes engage in regulation solely to modify the expression of their emotions (Greenaway & Kalokerinos, 2019). While individuals could be asked to report on their emotional expression, other sources of data could provide promising insight into how successful individuals are in modifying their expression. In laboratory studies, researchers have used behavioral coding of facial expression (e.g., Bonanno et al., 2004) or facial electromyography (EMG; e.g., Opitz et al., 2014) as indicators of successful modification of emotion expression. In addition, physiological measures such as skin conductance (Troy et al., 2018) have been used to indicate successful regulation in laboratory experiments focused on the arousal individuals are experiencing. In daily life, methods such as peer reports, ambulatory behavioral measures (e.g., ambulatory voice recording), or ambulatory physiology could also be useful in this regard.

Peer Reports

Peer reports of individuals’ personalities are predictive of important life outcomes (e.g., Jackson et al., 2015), suggesting that peers are able to pick up on meaningful aspects of someone’s personality that are not reported by the individual themselves. In terms of emotion regulation success, peer reports could be used to assess expressions that are explicitly the target of emotion regulation. For example, if someone indicates that they want to express more positive emotions, does their partner report that they express more positive emotions? Motive satisfaction could also be assessed using peer reports. For example, if an individual regulates their emotions to avoid conflict, does their partner or friend perceive less conflict in the relationship?

While the latter example illustrates the usefulness of peer reports in evaluating the achievement of pro-social motives, peer reports could also be useful for assessing successful regulation in light of other instrumental motives. Individuals often report wanting to regulate their emotions for performance reasons (e.g., to do well on a task; Kalokerinos et al., 2017). In settings in which performing well is socially desirable (e.g., at work or in a university setting), one might not be an unbiased observer of how well one regulates one’s emotions and individuals often lack awareness of whether they are distracted (e.g., Schooler et al., 2011). Colleagues, roommates, or classmates could provide valuable insight into whether performance motives are satisfied in situations in which self-reports are subject to bias.

Ambulatory Behavioral Measures

Another way of assessing emotion expression goals and motive satisfaction would be to leverage advances in technology and obtain behavioral data. A myriad of ambulatory assessment methodologies exist (Conner & Mehl, 2015) and technological advances will likely inspire rapid novel methodological developments. We focus on how two promising sources of behavioral data could be applied to the study of emotion regulation success: ambulatory voice recording (Mehl, 2017) and non-verbal expressions obtained through body cameras (Cohen et al., 2020; Naumann & Ramirez, 2021).

The Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR; Mehl, 2017) is a small gadget that participants carry with them for the study period that records snippets of their daily life. These audio snippets can then be coded for the presence of certain vocal expressions or behaviors. In the case of emotion regulation success, these could be coded either regarding emotion expression (e.g., how angry or happy are someone’s tone of voice or the verbal expressions they use) or regarding whether certain motives are satisfied (e.g., how much conflict people experience with peers based on coding conversations as an indicator of satisfying conflict avoidance motivation).

Portable cameras could be used to assess facial and non-verbal expressions that would not be picked up by the EAR. A previous study on patients with schizophrenia (Cohen et al., 2020) had participants repeatedly submit video recordings of themselves describing what they experienced in the last 2 hours. Facial coding software was then used to indicate the presence of positive and negative emotion expressions. While somewhat invasive (i.e., participants need to actively take a video of themselves), this study design could be used to assess whether people successfully regulate the expression of their emotions when applied at a proximal distance to a regulatory event. In dyadic contexts or social networks, portable cameras that face outwards (e.g., Naumann & Ramirez, 2021) could be used to assess the quality of social interactions as an indicator of social emotion regulation motive achievement or to assess emotion regulation of expression in social interactions (e.g., in a couple study the recordings from Partner A’s camera could be used to indicate whether Partner B successfully regulated their emotions).

Ambulatory Physiological Measures

Finally, psychological measures can be used to assess emotion regulation success. Recent studies on emotions have used ambulatory assessment of physiological arousal in daily life studies (e.g., heart rate and electrodermal activity; Van Doren et al., 2021). While a vast body of research has shown that measures of physiological arousal do not correspond well to self-reports of specific emotions (i.e., judging whether someone is feeling angry or fearful is difficult if only considering measures of autonomic responses), these measures can be used to reliably assess changes in valence and arousal of someone’s emotional state (Mauss & Robinson, 2009). For example, when using acceptance to regulate sadness, individuals show a reduction in dampening of skin conductance that is commonly observed when people experience sadness (Troy et al., 2018).

Individuals differ in their interoceptive awareness (Garfinkel et al., 2015) and in how their physiology is connected to their emotional experience (Brown et al., 2020; Van Doren et al., 2021). Research also suggests that physiological arousal can be intervened in the absence of intervening on one’s emotional experience (Faller et al., 2019). Parallel to focusing on successful regulation of expressions when goals are explicitly set for expression (Greenaway & Kalokerinos, 2019), one exciting future direction is examining whether individuals can successfully change their physiological state (e.g., slower heartbeat) if this is their goal. Sympathetic nervous system activation has also previously been interpreted as indicative of goal achievement (e.g., Kreibig et al., 2010), so study designs could potentially test and incorporate ambulatory physiology measures to indicate whether motives are satisfied.

Implications of Studying Emotion Regulation Success in Daily Life

Studying emotion regulation success with consideration of emotion regulation goals and distinction from emotion dysregulation or maladaptive emotion regulation can help address questions in personality, development, and mental health. In addition, this nuanced perspective on emotion regulation success may provide novel insight into addressing social issues and implementing more culturally inclusive practices in mental health research and treatment.

Personality psychologists argue that individuals differ not only in their tendencies to feel, think, and behave in certain ways (i.e., their personality traits) but also in their capacities for certain behaviors (i.e., socioemotional skills; Soto et al., 2021). Capacity for emotional resilience, defined as the ability to regulate emotions and moods, is one central aspect of socioemotional skills. Studying goal-focused emotion regulation success could provide novel insight into individual differences (e.g., are people with higher emotional resilience especially good at meeting prohedonic goals or certain instrumental motives?).

As individuals age, they report increased emotional well-being as indicated by higher positive affect and lower negative affect (Carstensen et al., 2011). It has been suggested that older adults become more successful at regulating their emotions (Charles & Carstensen, 2010). However, research investigating differences in using strategies deemed more or less adaptive in daily life mostly finds that older adults tend to not differ much from younger adults in which strategies they select in daily life (Isaacowitz, 2022). Studying emotion regulation in daily life in a way that separates the experience of positive and negative affect from emotion regulation success could help address the question of whether older adults actually regulate their emotions more successfully in the moment than younger adults. That is, are there age-related improvements in the ability to reach one’s emotion regulation goals?

Individuals with depression are often considered to be less successful at emotion regulation though they are able to successfully implement strategies in laboratory contexts (Liu & Thompson, 2017). In addition, the topic of maladaptive motive setting has recently gained attention in the context of depression. Some research suggests that individuals with depression are more likely to want to feel sad to verify their beliefs about themselves (Giesler et al., 1996; Millgram et al., 2015) and less likely to want to feel high-arousal positive affect (Swerdlow et al., 2019). It is possible that individuals with depression are regulating their emotions successfully in some situations but are not setting adaptive motives. Assessment of the daily environment (English & Eldesouky, 2020a; Greenaway et al., 2018; Harari et al., 2016) could be used in future studies to provide context for emotion regulation motives and goals, especially considering contexts that could selectively differ based on affective disorders (e.g., interpersonally problematic contexts in individuals with depression; Hammen, 2003). In addition, individuals often hold a diverse set of goals in general (Neal et al., 2017) and research on emotion regulation motives should investigate how the pursuit of several (potentially conflicting) motives or the prioritization of motives affects individuals’ regulation processes and outcomes. Finally, it has recently been shown that suicidal thinking can serve as a form of emotion regulation in that it temporarily decreases negative affect (Coppersmith et al., 2023). This extreme example shows how emotion regulation that might be temporarily successful at achieving the goal of reducing negative affect can have dire and unquestionably maladaptive consequences.

Our framework of emotion regulation success could also be applied to studying questions regarding behaviors such as alcohol or drug use. A recent meta-analysis showed that in contrast to pervasive theories about the regulatory function of substance use, individuals are not more likely to drink when they feel negative emotions (Dora et al., 2023). Incorporating the study of emotion regulation goals and emotion regulation success for maladaptive behaviors such as drinking could help further clarify if and how individuals use substances to (un)successfully or maladaptively regulate their emotions.

A definition of emotion regulation success that considers differences in emotion regulation goals has implications for inclusive clinical interventions or just-in-time interventions that are sensitive to identity aspects such as gender, neurodivergence, and cultural backgrounds. Due to gender norms, women tend to express less anger than men (Chaplin & Aldao, 2013). If women fail to meet this norm and express anger, they might therefore be more likely to be deemed unsuccessful at regulating their emotions. However, this would be an incorrect conclusion from our perspective if one does not consider their emotion regulation goals. Similarly, (incorrect) perceptions of people’s expressions might also impact how emotion regulation success is evaluated with regard to neurodivergence. People with autism have been found to experience difficulties regulating their emotions (Samson et al., 2012). Research has also shown that neurotypical individuals show difficulties in reading the facial expressions of individuals on the autism spectrum (Brewer et al., 2016). This suggests that judgments about whether people regulate their emotions successfully based on judging their facial expressions without considering emotion regulation goals might be particularly problematic and mental health interventions with neurodivergent individuals might benefit from a goal-sensitive emotion regulation success approach. Finally, research has shown that Asian Americans with depression express their positive and negative emotions differently from European Americans with depression (Chentsova-Dutton et al., 2007, 2010). Specifically, Asian Americans are more expressive and European Americans are less expressive when they experience depression compared to when they do not experience depression. This pattern is indicative of the cultural norm hypothesis, which predicts that depression reduces individuals’ abilities to react in culturally normative or ideal ways (i.e., disrupting European Americans’ abilities to express their emotions openly and Asian Americans’ abilities to moderate and control their emotions). Considering the cultural impact on goals that people have for their emotional experience and expression when assessing whether people are successfully regulating their emotions could be crucial for diagnosis and therapy. Especially in cases where participants have difficulties articulating their goals, culturally sensitive therapy approaches could provide important support.

Recently, researchers have brought attention to the role of emotion regulation in social issues such as political engagement (Ford & Feinberg, 2020) and dealing with racial injustice (Ford et al., 2022). In both cases, successfully regulating emotions to reduce one’s negative affect could have maladaptive consequences. People who reduce their negative affect in the moment when dealing with threatening political developments or being confronted with accusations of perpetrating racism might not benefit from the functions that negative emotions have to motivate behavior that would be beneficial in the long term (e.g., political action, anti-racist actions). Utilizing our framework of emotion regulation success could add to this line of research in assessing how successful emotion regulation in service of instrumental goals (e.g., wanting to make other people feel good) rather than prohedonic goals (i.e., wanting to make oneself feel good) might lead to more adaptive societal consequences.

Conclusion

Emotion regulation success has historically not been the focus of studies examining emotion regulation in daily life. The goal of this paper was to provide a definition of and examples for the measurement of emotion regulation success in naturalistic contexts. Emotion regulation success is defined as achieving one’s emotion goal or satisfying one’s emotion regulation motives. As individuals differ in the emotions they generally want to feel or express, or the emotions they want to feel or express in the moment, taking goals and motives into account can provide a clearer picture of how successfully individuals regulate their emotions in daily life. Emotion regulation success is distinct from dysregulated emotions and maladaptive emotion regulation. Both emotion goal achievement and emotion regulation motive satisfaction can add unique information to the study of emotion regulation success. Importantly, even if people successfully reach their emotion regulation goals, the achievement of these goals themselves could still be maladaptive for the individual. Direct or indirect self-reports of emotion regulation success can be utilized to gather information about someone’s success and novel statistical methodology, such as response surface analyses, can be utilized to study whether individuals successfully regulate their emotions. In addition, other data sources, such as peer reports or behavioral data, can be gathered to supplement or substitute self-reports of emotion regulation success. The study of emotion regulation success in daily life has the potential to answer key questions about personality, development, and mental health. In addition, this nuanced perspective on emotion regulation success may provide novel insight into addressing social issues and implementing more culturally inclusive practices in mental health research and practice, offering exciting new pathways to theoretical and applied advancements in affective science.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Stephen Antonoplis, Patrick Hill, and Renee Thompson for their feedback on the manuscript.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Tabea Springstein

References

Ajzen

(1991). The theory of planned behavior. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 50(2), 179–211.

Aldao

Nolen-Hoeksema

Schweizer

(2010). Emotion-regulation strategies across psychopathology: A meta-analytic review. Clinical Psychology Review, 30(2), 217–237.

Aldao

Sheppes

Gross

J. J.

(2015). Emotion regulation flexibility. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 39(3), 263–278.

Bailen

N. H.

Thompson

R. J.

(2019). Meta-emotions in daily life: Associations with emotional awareness and depression. Emotion, 19(5), 776–787.

Balzarotti

Biassoni

Colombo

Ciceri

M. R.

(2017). Cardiac vagal control as a marker of emotion regulation in healthy adults: A review. Biological Psychology, 130, 54–66.

Bigman

Y. E.

Mauss

I. B.

Gross

J. J.

Tamir

(2016). Yes I can: Expected success promotes actual success in emotion regulation. Cognition and Emotion, 30(7), 1380–1387.

Boden

M. T.

Thompson

R. J.

(2015). Facets of emotional awareness and associations with emotion regulation and depression. Emotion, 15(3), 399–410.

Bonanno

G. A.

Papa

Lalande

Westphal

Coifman

(2004). The importance of being flexible: The ability to both enhance and suppress emotional expression predicts long-term adjustment. Psychological Science, 15(7), 482–487.

Brans

Koval

Verduyn

Lim

Y. L.

Kuppens

(2013). The regulation of negative and positive affect in daily life. Emotion, 13(5), 926–939. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0032400

10.

Brewer

Biotti

Catmur

Press

Happé

Cook

Bird

(2016). Can neurotypical individuals read autistic facial expressions? Atypical production of emotional facial expressions in autism spectrum disorders. Autism Research, 9(2), 262–271.

11.

Brose

Schmiedek

Gerstorf

Voelkle

M. C.

(2020). The measurement of within-person affect variation. Emotion, 20(4), 677–699.

12.

Brown

C. L.

Van Doren

Ford

B. Q.

Mauss

I. B.

Sze

J. W.

Levenson

R. W.

(2020). Coherence between subjective experience and physiology in emotion: Individual differences and implications for well-being. Emotion, 20(5), 818–829.

13.

Campos

J. J.

Walle

E. A.

Dahl

Main

(2011). Reconceptualizing emotion regulation. Emotion Review, 3(1), 26–35.

14.

Carstensen

L. L.

Isaacowitz

D. M.

Charles

S. T.

(1999). Taking time seriously: A theory of socioemotional selectivity. American Psychologist, 54(3), 165–181. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.54.3.165

15.

Carstensen

L. L.

Turan

Scheibe

Ram

Ersner-Hershfield

Samanez-Larkin

G. R.

Brooks

K. P.

Nesselroade

J. R.

(2011). Emotional experience improves with age: Evidence based on over 10 years of experience sampling. Psychology and Aging, 26(1), 21–33. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0021285

16.

Carver

C. S.

Scheier

M. F.

Weintraub

J. K.

(1989). Assessing coping strategies: A theoretically based approach. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 56(2), 267–283.

17.

Chaplin

T. M.

Aldao

(2013). Gender differences in emotion expression in children: A meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin, 139(4), 735–765. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0030737

18.

Charles

S. T.

(2010). Strength and vulnerability integration: A model of emotional well-being across adulthood. Psychological Bulletin, 136(6), 1068–1091.

19.

Charles

S. T.

Carstensen

L. L.

(2010). Social and emotional aging. Annual Review of Psychology, 61, 383–409.

20.

Chentsova-Dutton

Y. E.

Chu

J. P.

Tsai

J. L.

Rottenberg

Gross

J. J.

Gotlib

I. H.

(2007). Depression and emotional reactivity: Variation among Asian Americans of East Asian descent and European Americans. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 116(4), 776–785.

21.

Chentsova-Dutton

Y. E.

Leontyeva

Halberstadt

A. G.

Adams

A. M.

(2021). And they all lived unhappily ever after: Positive and negative emotions in American and Russian picture books. Emotion, 21(8), 1585–1598.

22.

Chentsova-Dutton

Y. E.

Tsai

J. L.

Gotlib

I. H.

(2010). Further evidence for the cultural norm hypothesis: Positive emotion in depressed and control European American and Asian American women. Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, 16(2), 284–295.

23.

Cohen

A. S.

Cowan

T. P.

Schwartz

E. K.

Kirkpatrick

Raugh

I. M.

Chapman

H. C.

Strauss

G. P.

(2020). Ambulatory digital phenotyping of blunted affect and alogia using objective facial and vocal analysis: Proof of concept. Schizophrenia Research, 220, 141–146.

24.

Conner

T. S.

Mehl

M. R.

(2015). Ambulatory assessment—Methods for studying everyday life. In Scott

Kosslyn

Pinkerton

(Eds.), Emerging trends in the social and behavioral sciences (pp. 1–15). Wiley.

25.

Coppersmith

D. D.

Millgram

Kleiman

E. M.

Fortgang

R. G.

Millner

A. J.

Frumkin

M. R.

. . . Nock

M. K.

(2023). Suicidal thinking as affect regulation. Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science, 132(4), 385–395.

26.

Côté

Gyurak

Levenson

R. W.

(2010). The ability to regulate emotion is associated with greater well-being, income, and socioeconomic status. Emotion, 10(6), 923–933.

27.

Dejonckheere

Mestdagh

Houben

Rutten

Sels

Kuppens

Tuerlinckx

(2019). Complex affect dynamics add limited information to the prediction of psychological well-being. Nature Human Behaviour, 3(5), 478–491.

28.

DeSteno

Gross

J. J.

Kubzansky

(2013). Affective science and health: The importance of emotion and emotion regulation. Health Psychology, 325(5), 474–486.

29.

Dora

Piccirillo

Foster

K. T.

Arbeau

Armeli

Auriacombe

. . . King

(2023). The daily association between affect and alcohol use: A meta-analysis of individual participant data. Psychological Bulletin, 149, 1–24.

30.

Doré

B. P.

Silvers

J. A.

Ochsner

K. N.

(2016). Toward a personalized science of emotion regulation. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 10(4), 171–187.

31.

Edwards

J. R.

(2001). Alternatives to difference scores: Polynomial regression analysis and response surface methodology. In Drasgow

Schmitt

N. W.

(Eds.), Advances in measurement and data analysis (pp. 350–400). Jossey-Bass.

32.

Eisele

Vachon

Lafit

Kuppens

Houben

Myin-Germeys

Viechtbauer

(2022). The effects of sampling frequency and questionnaire length on perceived burden, compliance, and careless responding in experience sampling data in a student population. Assessment, 29(2), 136–151.

33.

Eldesouky

English

(2019). Individual differences in emotion regulation goals: Does personality predict the reasons why people regulate their emotions? Journal of Personality, 87(4), 750–766.

34.

English

Eldesouky

(2020a). Emotion regulation flexibility. European Journal of Psychological Assessment, 36(3), 456–459.

35.

English

Eldesouky

(2020b). We’re not alone: Understanding the social consequences of intrinsic emotion regulation. Emotion, 20(1), 43–47.

36.

English

Lee

I. A.

John

O. P.

Gross

J. J.

(2017). Emotion regulation strategy selection in daily life: The role of social context and goals. Motivation and Emotion, 41(2), 230–242.

37.

Faller

Cummings

Saproo

Sajda

(2019). Regulation of arousal via online neurofeedback improves human performance in a demanding sensory-motor task. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(13), 6482–6490.

38.

Fisk

G. M.

Friesen

J. P.

(2012). Perceptions of leader emotion regulation and LMX as predictors of followers’ job satisfaction and organizational citizenship behaviors. The Leadership Quarterly, 23(1), 1–12.

39.

Folkman

Lazarus

R. S.

(1980). An analysis of coping in a middle-aged community sample. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 21, 219–239.

40.

Ford

B. Q.

Feinberg

(2020). Coping with politics: The benefits and costs of emotion regulation. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 34, 123–128.

41.

Ford

B. Q.

Green

D. J.

Gross

J. J.

(2022). White fragility: An emotion regulation perspective. American Psychologist, 77(4), 510–524.

42.

Garfinkel

S. N.

Seth

A. K.

Barrett

A. B.

Suzuki

Critchley

H. D.

(2015). Knowing your own heart: Distinguishing interoceptive accuracy from interoceptive awareness. Biological Psychology, 104, 65–74.

43.

Giesler

R. B.

Josephs

R. A.

Swann

W. B.

Jr. (1996). Self-verification in clinical depression: The desire for negative evaluation. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 105(3), 358–368.

44.

Gottman

J. M.

Levenson

R. W.

(1992). Marital processes predictive of later dissolution: Behavior, physiology, and health. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63(2), 221–233.

45.

Grandey

A. A.

(2000). Emotional regulation in the workplace: A new way to conceptualize emotional labor. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 5(1), 95–110.

46.

Gratz

K. L.

Roemer

(2004). Multidimensional assessment of emotion regulation and dysregulation: Development, factor structure, and initial validation of the difficulties in emotion regulation scale. Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment, 26(1), 41–54.

47.

Greenaway

K. H.

Kalokerinos

E. K.

(2019). The intersection of goals to experience and express emotion. Emotion Review, 11(1), 50–62.

48.

Greenaway

K. H.

Kalokerinos

E. K.

Hinton

Hawkins

(2021). Emotion experience and expression goals shape emotion regulation strategy choice. Emotion, 21(7), 1452–1469.

49.

Greenaway

K. H.

Kalokerinos

E. K.

Williams

L. A.

(2018). Context is everything (in emotion research). Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 12(6), Article e12393.

50.

Gross

J. J.

(1998). Antecedent-and response-focused emotion regulation: Divergent consequences for experience, expression, and physiology. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(1), 224–237.

51.

Gross

J. J.

(1999). Emotion regulation: Past, present, future. Cognition & Emotion, 13(5), 551–573.

52.

Gross

J. J.

(2015). Emotion regulation: Current status and future prospects. Psychological Inquiry, 26(1), 1–26.

53.

Gross

J. J.

Jazaieri

(2014). Emotion, emotion regulation, and psychopathology: An affective science perspective. Clinical Psychological Science, 2(4), 387–401.

54.

Gross

J. J.

Richards

J. M.

John

O. P.

(2006). Emotion regulation in everyday life. In Snyder

D. K.

Simpson

Hughes

J. N.

(Eds.), Emotion regulation in couples and families: Pathways to dysfunction and health (pp. 13–35). American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/11468-001

55.

Growney

C. M.

English

(2023). Fluid and crystallized cognitive resources differentially linked to emotion regulation success in adulthood. Emotion, 23(2), 589–594. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0001087

56.

Gutentag

Halperin

Porat

Bigman

Y. E.

Tamir

(2017). Successful emotion regulation requires both conviction and skill: Beliefs about the controllability of emotions, reappraisal, and regulation success. Cognition and Emotion, 31(6), 1225–1233.

57.

Hamaker

E. L.

Ceulemans

Grasman

R. P. P. P.

Tuerlinckx

(2015). Modeling affect dynamics: State of the art and future challenges. Emotion Review, 7(4), 316–322.

58.

Hammen

(2003). Interpersonal stress and depression in women. Journal of Affective Disorders, 74(1), 49–57.

59.

Harari

G. M.

Lane

N. D.

Wang

Crosier

B. S.

Campbell

A. T.

Gosling

S. D.

(2016). Using smartphones to collect behavioral data in psychological science: Opportunities, practical considerations, and challenges. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 11(6), 838–854.

60.

Hisler

G. C.

Krizan

DeHart

Wright

A. G.

(2020). Neuroticism as the intensity, reactivity, and variability in day-to-day affect. Journal of Research in Personality, 87, 103964.

61.

Hoeksma

J. B.

Oosterlaan

Schipper

E. M.

(2004). Emotion regulation and the dynamics of feelings: A conceptual and methodological framework. Child Development, 75(2), 354–360.

62.

Hoffmann

J. D.

Brackett

M. A.

Bailey

C. S.

Willner

C. J.

(2020). Teaching emotion regulation in schools: Translating research into practice with the RULER approach to social and emotional learning. Emotion, 20(1), 105–109.

63.

Humberg

Nestler

Back

M. D.

(2019). Response surface analysis in personality and social psychology: Checklist and clarifications for the case of congruence hypotheses. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 10(3), 409–419.

64.

Isaacowitz

D. M.

(2022). What do we know about aging and emotion regulation? Perspectives on Psychological Science, 17(6), 1541–1555.

65.

Isasi

C. R.

Ostrovsky

N. W.

Wills

T. A.

(2013). The association of emotion regulation with lifestyle behaviors in inner-city adolescents. Eating Behaviors, 14(4), 518–521.

66.

Jackson

J. J.

Connolly

J. J.

Garrison

S. M.

Leveille

M. M.

Connolly

S. L.

(2015). Your friends know how long you will live: A 75-year study of peer-rated personality traits. Psychological Science, 26(3), 335–340.

67.

Kalokerinos

E. K.

Erbas

Ceulemans

Kuppens

(2019). Differentiate to regulate: Low negative emotion differentiation is associated with ineffective use but not selection of emotion-regulation strategies. Psychological Science, 30(6), 863–879.

68.

Kalokerinos

E. K.

Tamir

Kuppens

(2017). Instrumental motives in negative emotion regulation in daily life: Frequency, consistency, and predictors. Emotion, 17(4), 648–657. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000269

69.

Koole

S. L.

Webb

T. L.

Sheeran

P. L.

(2015). Implicit emotion regulation: Feeling better without knowing why. Current Opinion in Psychology, 3, 6–10.

70.

Koopmann-Holm

Tsai

J. L.

(2014). Focusing on the negative: Cultural differences in expressions of sympathy. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 107(6), 1092–1115.

71.

Kopetz

Orehek

(2015). When the end justifies the means: Self-defeating behaviors as “rational” and “successful” self-regulation. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 24(5), 386–391.

72.

Koval

Butler

E. A.

Hollenstein

Lanteigne

Kuppens

(2015). Emotion regulation and the temporal dynamics of emotions: Effects of cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression on emotional inertia. Cognition and Emotion, 29(5), 831–851.

73.

Koval

Kalokerinos

E. K.

Greenaway

Medland

Kuppens

Nezlek

J. B.

Hinton

J. D. X.

Gross

(2022). Emotion regulation in everyday life: Mapping global self-reports to daily processes. Emotion, 23(2), 357–374.

74.

Koval

Kalokerinos

E. K.

Verduyn

Greiff

(2020). Introduction to the special issue: Capturing the dynamics of emotion and emotion regulation in daily life with ambulatory assessment. European Journal of Psychological Assessment, 36(3), 433–436.

75.

Kreibig

S. D.

Gendolla

G. H.

Scherer

K. R.

(2010). Psychophysiological effects of emotional responding to goal attainment. Biological Psychology, 84(3), 474–487.

76.

Kritzler

Horstmann

K. T.

Luhmann

(2021, December 6). Are trait–state fit and state–situation fit informative of within-person processes of personality state expression? Preprint PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/95hg2

77.

Lane

A. M.

Beedie

C. J.

Devonport

T. J.

Stanley

D. M.

(2011). Instrumental emotion regulation in sport: Relationships between beliefs about emotion and emotion regulation strategies used by athletes. Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, 21(6), e445–e451.

78.

Larsen

R. J.

(2000). Toward a science of mood regulation. Psychological Inquiry, 11(3), 129–141.

79.

Lennarz

H. K.

Hollenstein

Lichtwarck-Aschoff

Kuntsche

Granic

(2019). Emotion regulation in action: Use, selection, and success of emotion regulation in adolescents’ daily lives. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 43(1), 1–11.

80.

Liu

D. Y.

Thompson

R. J.

(2017). Selection and implementation of emotion regulation strategies in major depressive disorder: An integrative review. Clinical Psychology Review, 57, 183–194.

81.

Livingstone

K. M.

Srivastava

(2012). Up-regulating positive emotions in everyday life: Strategies, individual differences, and associations with positive emotion and well-being. Journal of Research in Personality, 46(5), 504–516.

82.

Lopes

P. N.

Salovey

Côté

Beers

Petty

R. E.

(2005). Emotion regulation abilities and the quality of social interaction. Emotion, 5(1), 113–118.

83.

Mauss

I. B.

Robinson

M. D.

(2009). Measures of emotion: A review. Cognition and Emotion, 23(2), 209–237.

84.

McMahon

T. P.

Naragon-Gainey

(2019). The multilevel structure of daily emotion-regulation-strategy use: An examination of within-and between-person associations in naturalistic settings. Clinical Psychological Science, 7(2), 321–339.

85.

McRae

(2013). Emotion regulation frequency and success: Separating constructs from methods and time scale. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 7(5), 289–302.

86.

Mehl

M. R.

(2017). The electronically activated recorder (EAR): A method for the naturalistic observation of daily social behavior. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 26(2), 184–190.

87.

Millgram

Joormann

Huppert

J. D.

Tamir

(2015). Sad as a matter of choice? Emotion-regulation goals in depression. Psychological Science, 26(8), 1216–1228.

88.

Naumann

L. P.

Ramirez

P. Y.

(2021). Caught on camera: Cross-race interactions captured in daily life. Journal of Research in Personality, 92, 104101.

89.

Neal

Ballard

Vancouver

J. B.

(2017). Dynamic self-regulation and multiple-goal pursuit. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 4, 401–423.

90.

Nestler

Humberg

Schönbrodt

F. D.

(2019). Response surface analysis with multilevel data: Illustration for the case of congruence hypotheses. Psychological Methods, 24(3), 291–308.

91.

Nezlek

J. B.

Kuppens

(2008). Regulating positive and negative emotions in daily life. Journal of Personality, 76(3), 561–580.

92.

Northcott

Diener

Zyphur

West

(2021). Beyond experiments. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 17, 1101–1119.

93.

Opitz

P. C.

Lee

I. A.

Gross

J. J.

Urry

H. L.

(2014). Fluid cognitive ability is a resource for successful emotion regulation in older and younger adults. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, Article 609.

94.

Quoidbach

Berry

E. V.

Hansenne

Mikolajczak

(2010). Positive emotion regulation and well-being: Comparing the impact of eight savoring and dampening strategies. Personality and Individual Differences, 49(5), 368–373.

95.

Riediger

Schmiedek

Wagner

G. G.

Lindenberger

(2009). Seeking pleasure and seeking pain: Differences in prohedonic and contra-hedonic motivation from adolescence to old age. Psychological Science, 20(12), 1529–1535.

96.

Robinson

M. D.

Clore

G. L.

(2002). Belief and feeling: Evidence for an accessibility model of emotional self-report. Psychological Bulletin, 128(6), 934–960. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.128.6.934

97.

Samson

A. C.

Huber

Gross

J. J.

(2012). Emotion regulation in Asperger’s syndrome and high-functioning autism. Emotion, 12(4), 659–665. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0027975

98.

Scheibe

English

Tsai

J. L.

Carstensen

L. L.

(2013). Striving to feel good: Ideal affect, actual affect, and their correspondence across adulthood. Psychology and Aging, 28(1), 160–171.

99.

Schooler

J. W.

Smallwood

Christoff

Handy

T. C.

Reichle

E. D.

Sayette

M. A.

(2011). Meta-awareness, perceptual decoupling and the wandering mind. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 15(7), 319–326.

100.

Schwartz

S. H.

Cieciuch

Vecchione

Davidov

Fischer

Beierlein

Ramos

Verkasalo

Lönnqvist

J.-E.

Demirutku

Dirilen-Gumus

Konty

(2012). Refining the theory of basic individual values. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 103(4), 663–688. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0029393

101.

Senft

Campos

Shiota

M. N.

Chentsova-Dutton

Y. E.

(2021). Who emphasizes positivity? An exploration of emotion values in people of Latino, Asian, and European heritage living in the United States. Emotion, 21(4), 707–719. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000737

102.

Soto

C. J.

Napolitano

C. M.

Roberts

B. W.

(2021). Taking skills seriously: Toward an integrative model and agenda for social, emotional, and behavioral skills. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 30(1), 26–33.

103.

Southward

M. W.

Cheavens

J. S.

(2020). More (of the right strategies) is better: Disaggregating the naturalistic between-and within-person structure and effects of emotion regulation strategies. Cognition and Emotion, 34(8), 1729–1736.

104.

Swerdlow

B. A.

Pearlstein

J. G.

Johnson

S. L.

(2019). Multivariate associations of ideal affect with clinical symptoms. Emotion, 19(4), 617–628. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000468

105.

Tamir

(2016). Why do people regulate their emotions? A taxonomy of motives in emotion regulation. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 20(3), 199–222.

106.

Tamir

(2021). Effortful emotion regulation as a unique form of cybernetic control. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 16(1), 94–117.

107.

Tamir

Schwartz

S. H.

Cieciuch

Riediger

Torres

Scollon

Dzokoto

Zhou

Vishkin

(2016). Desired emotions across cultures: A value-based account. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 111(1), 67–82. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000072

108.

Thompson

R. J.

Springstein

Boden

(2021). Gaining clarity about emotion differentiation. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 15(3), Article e12584.

109.

Troy

A. S.

Shallcross

A. J.

Brunner

Friedman

Jones

M. C.

(2018). Cognitive reappraisal and acceptance: Effects on emotion, physiology, and perceived cognitive costs. Emotion, 18(1), 58–74. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000371

110.

Troy

A. S.

Willroth

E. C.

Shallcross

A. J.

Giuliani

N. R.

Gross

J. J.

Mauss

I. B.

(2023). Psychological resilience: An affect-regulation framework. Annual Review of Psychology, 74, 547–576.

111.

Trull

T. J.

Solhan

M. B.

Tragesser

S. L.

Jahng

Wood

P. K.

Piasecki

T. M.

Watson

(2008). Affective instability: Measuring a core feature of borderline personality disorder with ecological momentary assessment. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 117(3), 647–661. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0012532

112.

Tsai

J. L.

(2017). Ideal affect in daily life: Implications for affective experience, health, and social behavior. Current Opinion in Psychology, 17, 118–128

113.

Tsai

J. L.

Knutson

Fung

H. H.

(2006). Cultural variation in affect valuation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90(2), 288–307.

114.

Van Doren

Dickens

C. N.

Benson

Brick

T. R.

Gatzke-Kopp

Oravecz

. (2021). Capturing emotion coherence in daily life: Using ambulatory physiology measures and ecological momentary assessments to examine within-person associations and individual differences. Biological Psychology, 162, 108074.

115.

Wendt

L. P.

Wright

A. G.

Pilkonis

P. A.

Woods

W. C.

Denissen

J. J.

Kühnel

Zimmermann

(2020). Indicators of affect dynamics: Structure, reliability, and personality correlates. European Journal of Personality, 34(6), 1060–1072.

116.

Wenzel

Rowland

Kubiak

(2021). How much variance can event intensity and emotion regulation strategies explain in momentary affect in daily life? Emotion, 54, 274–289.

117.

Wilms

Lanwehr

Kastenmüller

(2021). Always look on the bright side of life? Exploring the between-variance and within-variance of emotion regulation goals. Motivation and Emotion, 45(2), 235–247.

118.

Wirth

Voss

Wirth

Rothermund

(2021). Affect dynamics and well-being: Explanatory power of the model of intraindividual variability in affect (MIVA). Cognition and Emotion, 36, 188–210.

119.

Wong

Tschan

Semmer

N. K.

(2017). Effort in emotion work and well-being: The role of goal attainment. Emotion, 17(1), 67–77.

120.

Wylie

M. S.

Colasante

De France

Lin

Hollenstein

(2022). Momentary emotion regulation strategy use and success: Testing the influences of emotion intensity and habitual strategy use. Emotion, 23, 375–386. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0001074