Emotion differentiation emphasises labelling emotional experiences in a precise and context-sensitive way. Negative emotion differentiation (NED) has been found to be associated with mental health, where emotion regulation (ER) may act as a pathway. The current study aims to explore the association between NED and flexible ER implementation in daily life. Specifically, we examined how NED was associated with two aspects of ER flexibility: contextual synchrony and temporal ER variability. 101 college students (54% female; Mage = 20.24 years) reported their momentary emotions via a 7-day experience sampling protocol, and the intraclass correlation coefficients were calculated to reflect NED. In 10-day daily diaries, they also reported information about the most negative event during the day (i.e. event type, event intensity and ER goal) and how they regulated their emotions. The results revealed that individuals with high NED showed higher levels of synchrony between change in ER use and change in event type and ER goal. In addition, NED was positively associated with both within- and between-strategy variability in ER use. The results demonstrated that the ability to differentiate between negative emotions was related to higher ER flexibility, which shed new light on understanding the role of emotion differentiation in well-being.

Research on emotion regulation (ER) has increasingly recognized that people use multiple strategies simultaneously, often referred to as ER repertoire. Prior research found that ER repertoire is associated with psychopathology, but results have been mixed. Indeed, research from recent years suggests that it is the quality of ERs, more than their quantity, that needs to be considered. Based on the combination of the literatures on ER repertoire, polyregulation, and ER flexibility, we propose a novel metric: the ratio of using putatively maladaptive (vs. all) ER strategies. Using this metric, we examine (1) maladaptive ER ratio changes during the transition to adolescence, a developmental period in which the prevalence of depression sharply increases, and (2) whether changes in maladaptive ER ratio are associated with depressive symptoms. One-hundred and thirty-nine youths (baseline age: 8-15) reported ER strategies and depression daily for 21 days. One year later, 115 completed another 28-day daily-diary (Nassessments = 5631). Our results show that almost all youth use at least some maladaptive ERs. Importantly, maladaptive ER ratio decreases over a year of adolescence for most youths. Conversely, an increased maladaptive ER ratio predicted depression increases on the daily and on the yearly level. These results shed light on typical and atypical development of ER flexibility and emphasize the need to consider the balance between ERs in relation to psychopathology.

UNASSIGNED: Recent conceptualizations of adaptive emotion regulation is predicated on the ability to flexibly use emotion regulation strategies to meet changing contextual demands. Although trait mindfulness has been linked to enhanced emotional well-being and use of adaptive emotion regulation strategies, there is a dearth of literature examining associations between trait mindfulness and emotion regulation flexibility. Further, despite a rich literature suggesting that emotion regulation processes change with age, no study to date has assessed whether the role of trait mindfulness on emotion regulation responsiveness to negative emotions-a component of emotion regulation flexibility-differs between young and older adults.
UNASSIGNED: The current study recruited 130 young adults and 130 older adults to assess trait mindfulness, emotion regulation strategy use, and emotion regulation responsiveness of six distinct strategies in daily life.
UNASSIGNED: Across the full sample, trait mindfulness was related to reduced distraction (β = -0.11, t(238.09) = -3.02, p = .003) and expressive suppression (β = -0.15, t(237.70) = -4.62, p < .001) strategy use. Age moderation analyses revealed that trait mindfulness was associated with reduced expressive suppression responsiveness (β = 0.12, t(247) = 2.31, p = .022) in young adults and increased detached reappraisal responsiveness among older adults (β = 0.15, t(247) = -2.95, p = .003).
UNASSIGNED: The current findings highlight the importance of understanding how trait mindfulness is associated with strategy use and responsiveness to negative affect changes in daily life as well as how these patterns may shift across the lifespan.
UNASSIGNED: Open Science Framework, registration number: z5g8v.

BACKGROUND: While evidence shows that people with early psychosis are flexible in using different emotion regulation (ER) strategies to manage the varying contextual demands, no studies have examined the effectiveness of such regulatory flexibility in this population. We addressed this issue by investigating whether and how ER flexibility relate to different dynamic aspects (variability, instability, inertia, and recovery) of negative affect (NA) in a combined early psychosis sample, consisting of both individuals at high clinical risk for psychosis and those diagnosed with first-episode psychosis.
METHODS: Participants were 148 individuals from the INTERACT project, a multi-center randomized controlled trial on the efficacy of acceptance and commitment therapy in early psychosis. We utilized data from the baseline assessment, during which all participants completed six days of experience sampling assessment of momentary NA, as well as end-of-day assessments of ER strategy use.
RESULTS: Multilevel models of within-person associations showed that greater ER flexibility was associated with more stable NA, and quicker recovery of NA from stressors during the day. Linear regression analyses of between-person associations showed that people who had more variable and unstable NA reported greater ER flexibility generally. No evidence was found for associations with NA inertia.
CONCLUSIONS: The current study identified unique within-person and between-person links between ER flexibility and dynamics of NA in early psychosis. These findings further provide evidence for ER flexibility in early psychosis, emphasizing the adaptive nature of regulatory flexibility in relation to reduced instability in NA and faster recovery from NA in everyday life.

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Emotion regulation (ER) diversity, defined as the variety, frequency, and evenness of ER strategies used, may predict social anxiety (SA) severity. In a sample of individuals with high (n=113) or low (n=42) SA severity, we tested whether four trait ER diversity metrics predicted group membership. We generalized existing trait ER diversity calculations to repeated-measures data to test if state-level metrics (using two weeks of EMA data) predicted SA severity within the higher severity group. As hypothesized (osf.io/xadyp), higher trait ER diversity within avoidance-oriented strategies predicted greater likelihood of belonging to the higher severity group. At the state-level, higher diversity across all ER strategies, and within and between avoidance- and approach-oriented strategies, predicted higher SA severity (but only after controlling for number of submitted EMAs). Only diversity within avoidance-oriented strategies was significantly correlated across trait and state levels. Findings suggest that high avoidance-oriented ER diversity may co-occur with higher SA severity.

Previous research suggests that social anxiety symptoms are maintained and intensified by inflexible emotion regulation (ER). Therefore, we examined whether trait-level social anxiety moderates ER flexibility operationalised at both between-person (covariation between variability in emotional intensity and variability in strategy use across occasions) and within-person (associations between emotional intensity and strategy use on a given day) levels. In a sample of healthy college-aged adults (N = 185, Mage = 21.89), we examined overall and emotion-specific intensities (shame, guilt, anxiety, anger, sadness) and regulatory strategies (i.e. experiential avoidance, expressive suppression, and rumination) in response to each day\'s most emotionally intense event over 6 days. During the study period, we found a positive association between variability in emotional intensity and variability of experiential avoidance in individuals with lower, rather than higher, levels of trait social anxiety after controlling for key covariates (i.e. gender, personality traits, and stress exposure). However, we did not find evidence for the moderating role of trait social anxiety in ER flexibility assessed at within-person levels. Our findings highlight the need to delineate dynamic ER flexibility across everyday events.

Previous research on emotion regulation has focused more on the regulation effects corresponding to a particular emotion regulation strategy, yet the same regulation strategy may produce different regulation effects in different contexts. Similarly, one regulation strategy may not be applicable to all situations. Emotion regulation choice refers to the process by which individuals choose different regulation strategies in different contexts. Executive control and the level of engagement-disengagement considerations are the cognitive mechanisms of emotion regulation choice, while the neural mechanisms of emotion regulation choice still need to be explored more directly and deeply. Studies have found that affective, cognitive, and motivational factors have different degrees of influence on emotion regulation choice. However, there is still a lack of a reliable framework to systematically investigate the relationship between these influences and the outcome of their combined effect on emotion regulation choices. Future research needs to further explore the neurophysiological basis of emotion regulation choice by using different techniques and constructing a complete model based on multiple factors to more accurately grasp the dynamic process of emotion regulation choice.

Adolescence is an important stage for the development of emotion regulation skills, especially for adolescent girls who are at elevated risk for the development of depression and anxiety. Although some emotion regulation strategies are more effective at helping adolescents regulate negative affect on average, research indicates strategy effectiveness varies with the context in which a strategy is deployed. Yet less work has been done examining which contextual factors are associated with adolescents switching emotion regulation strategies in their daily lives. This study examined individual and contextual factors related to negative interpersonal events that are associated with strategy effectiveness, including age, emotional intensity, perceived controllability, and co-regulatory support, and their association with adolescent emotion regulation strategy switching in daily life via ecological momentary assessment. Results indicated that adolescent girls differed in the degree to which they altered their emotion regulation strategies throughout their daily lives, and that switching strategies was associated with age as well as individual and within-person differences in perceived controllability, emotional intensity, and co-regulatory support. This study provides critical proof-of-concept of the utility of emotion regulation strategy switching as a measure of regulatory flexibility and highlights regulatory processes that may hold clues to the mechanisms of developmental psychopathology.

Flexible use of emotion regulation (ER) strategies in daily life is theorized to depend on appraisals of occurring stressful events. Yet, to date, little is known about (a) how appraisals of the current situation modulate the use of ER strategies in daily life and (b) how individual differences in affective symptoms impact these relations among appraisals and ER strategy use. This study attempted to address these two limitations using a 5-day experience sampling protocol, with three surveys administered per day in a sample of 97 participants. Each survey measured momentary appraisals of stress intensity and controllability as well as ER strategy use (i.e., rumination, reappraisal, avoidance, and active coping). Results showed that, in situations of low-stress intensity, higher stress controllability was related to greater use of reappraisal and rumination. In situations of high-stress intensity, higher controllability was related to reduced use of rumination. This pattern of flexible use of ER strategies depending on momentary stress appraisals was found for both rumination and avoidance and occurred specifically in individuals reporting lower levels of depression and/or anxiety levels. These findings provide new insight into how flexible use of ER strategies in daily life is modulated by interactions between stress intensity and controllability appraisals at varying levels of affective symptoms.
UNASSIGNED: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42761-022-00122-9.