Regulation Without Regulating? Exploring Misalignment Between Self-Reported Emotion Regulation Attempts and Strategy Use

Le résumé fourni par la source

Theory suggests that in the process of emotion regulation, people form an intention to regulate, and then act on this intention. Although theory posits these are distinct yet sequentially linked stages, most research focuses on each stage in isolation. We addressed this gap in the literature by exploring how, and to what degree, self-reported attempts to regulate emotions are linked with self-reported regulatory behaviors in the form of commonly studied emotion regulation strategies. Across three experience sampling studies (Ntotal=683), we empirically tested the link between emotion regulation attempts and behaviors. We were particularly interested in occasions when these stages are disconnected: when people report making no attempt to regulate emotion, and yet report engaging in an emotion regulation strategy. We term this phenomenon emotion regulation misalignment and found it occurred in all three studies on 13-42% of occasions. We also explored whether misalignment was more or less prevalent for certain strategies and found that, although misalignment occurred for all strategies, it was most likely for suppression and social sharing, and least likely for reappraisal and distraction. In all, we provide evidence to suggest that behaviors intended to capture emotion regulation strategies can occur independent of intentional attempts at emotion regulation. This work has implications for how researchers measure emotion regulation and emotion regulation strategies, and how we theorize about what emotion regulation is.

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