EMOTION REGULATION IN CONTEXT: CONSIDERING THE ROLE OF MOTIVES, PERSONALITY TRAITS, AND EMOTION COMPETENCE IN INFLUENCING THE DAILY USE OF EMOTION REGULATION STRATEGIES

Abstract

People regulate their emotions for an array of reasons. These reasons are labelled as motives in emotion regulation and can be classified into the categories of hedonic, performance, social, and epistemic motives. People also use various strategies to regulate their emotions, such as adaptive engagement, suppression, and rumination when regulating negative emotions, and savoring and dampening when regulating positive emotions. Using an experience sampling methodology (N=119), we examined how motives and dispositional variables, such as personality traits and emotion competence, influence the use of emotion regulation strategies in regulating positive and negative emotions in a daily context and mapped out their associations. Also, we investigated the potential moderating role of personality traits in the relations between motives and emotion regulation strategies. However, personality was not found to be a moderator. This study contributes to the growing literature that contextualizes emotion regulation by understanding the factors that impact emotion regulation processes.