Emotion regulation in the context of daily stress: Impact on daily affect

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Highlights

  • A daily diary study tested the impact of emotion regulation and stress on affect.

  • Suppression negatively impacts positive affect during high but not low stress.

  • It is important to consider emotion regulation in the context of stressful events.

Abstract

A daily diary study was used to examine how person-level emotion regulation (i.e., reappraisal and suppression) impacts daily affect following stressful daily life events. Research has highlighted the positive and negative impacts of reappraisal and suppression on daily affect, respectively, but has yet to investigate emotion regulation in light of daily stress. After completing a measure of emotion regulation, participants completed measures of daily stress and daily affect at the end of each day for one week. As hypothesized, multilevel modeling results indicated that as daily stress increased, individuals were more likely to report lower positive and higher negative affect. Consistent with prior research, reappraisal was associated with better affect. Suppression was associated with lower positive affect. The main finding of this study was a significant cross-level interaction of daily stress and suppression on daily positive affect where individuals high in suppression experienced lower positive affect on days of high stress than days of low stress. This suggests that suppression may not be detrimental in low stress situations when emotion regulation is less important, but negatively impacts positive affect during high stress. These results point to the importance of considering emotion regulation in the context of stressful life events.

Section snippets

Participants

Data for the present study are from a larger data set on daily well-being of 396 undergraduate students. Another study (Richardson & Rice, 2015) was published using this same data set. It tested the associations between self-critical perfectionism and daily disclosure of daily stress and included one of the three variables used in the present study (daily stress). The sample for this study included 396 participants, 79% women, with a mean age of 19.77 (SD = 1.40), who were recruited from general

Preliminary analyses

There were no missing data for the ERQ Reappraisal and Suppression that was completed at the initial survey session. Some data were missing from daily diary entries due to nonresponse. Daily diary data were dropped from 20 participants who completed fewer than three daily entries (Garrison et al., 2012). After removing these 20 participants, participants completed an average of 6.31 (SD = 0.97) daily diary entries. In total, there were 2372 daily diary entries. Table 1 summarizes descriptive

Discussion

The purpose of this study was to investigate how emotion regulation style (reappraisal or suppression) impacts daily positive and negative affect during stressful daily life events. First, MLM was used to examine associations between daily stress and daily affect, anticipating significant intraindividual coupling where increased daily stress would be associated with higher negative affect and lower positive affect. This hypothesis was supported suggesting that individuals are more likely to

Conclusions

In conclusion, the present study expands upon previous literature by examining the impact of daily stress on the emotion regulation-daily affect association. Findings indicate that daily stress is associated with reduced positive affect and heightened negative affect. Also, individuals who typically engage in reappraisal experience higher positive affect and lower negative affect in their daily lives than those who are less likely to use reappraisal. In contrast, those who typically engage in

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