Abstract
Background
The extent to which a person believes they can change or control their own emotions is associated with trait-level symptoms of mood and anxiety-related psychopathology.
Method
The present study examined how this belief relates to momentary and daily self-reports of affect, emotion regulation tendencies, and perceived effectiveness of emotion regulation attempts throughout a five-week experience sampling study conducted in N = 113 high socially anxious people (https://osf.io/eprwt/).
Results
Results suggest that people with relatively stronger beliefs that their emotions are malleable experienced more momentary and daily positive affect (relative to negative affect), even after controlling for social anxiety symptom severity (although only daily positive affect, and not momentary positive affect, remained significant after correcting for false discovery rate). However, emotion malleability beliefs were not uniquely associated with other emotion regulation-related outcomes in daily life, despite theory suggesting malleability beliefs influence motivation to engage in emotion regulation.
Conclusion
The paucity of significant associations observed between trait malleability beliefs and momentary and daily self-reports of emotion regulation (despite consistent findings of such relationships at trait levels) calls for additional research to better understand the complex dynamics of emotion beliefs in daily life.
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Notes
The strategies were: “ruminating about something” (rumination); “coming up with ideas/plans for action” (problem solving); “accepting them” (acceptance); “criticizing myself” (self-criticism); “thinking of the situation differently” (cognitive reappraisal); “thinking about the things that went/are going well” (thinking good thoughts); “pushing away bad thoughts” (thought suppression); “tackling the issue head on” (tackling the issue head on); “drinking alcohol” (alcohol); “using marijuana, nicotine, or other drugs” (drugs); “eating food” (eating); “exercising” (exercising), “TV/internet/gaming” (TV/gaming); “sleeping” (sleeping); “seeking advice/comfort from others” (advice-seeking); “ignoring/avoiding certain people/situations” (situational avoidance); hiding my thoughts/feelings from others (expression suppression); “doing something fun with others” (doing something fun with others). Participants saw the text in quotation marks rather than the conceptual labels in parentheses.
Given that approximately half of the participants were randomized to receive an online cognitive bias modification for interpretations (CBM-I) intervention during Week 3 of the 5-week study, we statistically control for study condition in all analyses. Although CBM-I does not directly target emotion malleability beliefs (rather, it aims to reduce the tendency to rigidly interpret ambiguous social situations negatively, see Mathews and Mackintosh 2000), it is possible that the online intervention may have influenced emotion mindset and therefore daily life outcomes following the intervention.
In response to a helpful reviewer comment, we included overall daily negative affect as a control variable and random intercept in all daily analyses (with the exception of the model predicting overall daily affect).
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Funding
This research was supported by an NIH R01MH113752-01 Grant Awarded to Bethany A. Teachman and a University of Virginia Hobby Postdoctoral and Pre-doctoral Fellows Grant awarded to Bethany A. Teachman and Laura E. Barnes.
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Authors Katharine E. Daniel, Fallon R. Goodman, Miranda L. Beltzer, Alexander R. Daros, Mehdi Boukhechba, Laura E. Barnes and Bethany A. Teachman have no conflict of interest to declare.
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The University of Virginia’s Institutional Review Board for the Social and Behavioral Sciences approved the study (2018-0018-00). All participants provided informed consent and all study procedures met ethical standards.
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Daniel, K.E., Goodman, F.R., Beltzer, M.L. et al. Emotion Malleability Beliefs and Emotion Experience and Regulation in the Daily Lives of People with High Trait Social Anxiety. Cogn Ther Res 44, 1186–1198 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10608-020-10139-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10608-020-10139-8