Do I really feel better? Effectiveness of emotion regulation strategies depends on the measure and social anxiety

Abstract

Background: Effective emotion regulation (ER) is important to long-term healthy functioning, but little is known about what constitutes effective ER in the moment or how social anxiety symptoms and different strategies influence short-term effectiveness outcomes.Methods: Intensive ecological momentary data from N = 124 college students illustrate how different ways of operationalizing ER effectiveness leads to different conclusions about the short-term effectiveness of different strategies in daily life.Results: When effectiveness is operationalized as the degree to which participants judged that their ER attempts made them feel better, social anxiety severity was negatively associated with effectiveness, and avoidance-oriented strategies were judged to be less effective than engagement-oriented strategies. In contrast, when effectiveness is operationalized as the degree of change in self-reported affect following ER attempts, social anxiety severity was not related to effectiveness, and avoidance-oriented strategies were more effective than engagement-oriented strategies. Social anxiety and ER strategy type did not interact in either model, regardless of how effectiveness was measured. Conclusions:The study highlights discrepancies when examining two common but distinct ways of measuring the same overarching effectiveness construct, and raises intriguing questions about how forms of psychopathology that are intimately tied to emotion dysregulation, like social anxiety, moderate different ways of measuring the effectiveness of ER attempts.

Specifying the mechanisms and targets of emotion regulation: A translational framework from affective science to psychological treatment.

“…The distinction between emotion regulation self-efficacy and effectiveness is also important to note, as these constructs may be differentially related to emotional outcomes. Daniel et al (2019) compared perceptions of emotion regulation self-efficacy and effectiveness in an EMA study of undergraduates. Six times per day for two weeks, participants reported their emotion regulation strategy use, positive and negative affect, and the degree to which each strategy improved their mood.…”

Digital Technologies for Emotion-Regulation Assessment and Intervention: A Conceptual Review

“…Several studies have used EMA to assess regulation in the context of stress (e.g., Connolly & Alloy, 2017;Goldschmidt et al, 2014). Researchers may restrict assessment to the context of a recent stressor (e.g., discrimination experiences, Livingston et al, 2017) or ask about regulation without a specific stressor context (Daniel et al, 2019). Research using EMA has also highlighted the importance of the social context-or how engaging in regulation with another person, including caregivers or peers, may influence psychological outcomes (Silk, 2019;Waller et al, 2014).…”

“…Finally, strategy implementation effectiveness can also be explored via EMA methods. Perceived effectiveness may be examined by directly asking participants whether a given strategy helped or changed how they felt (e.g., Daniel et al, 2019) or may be deduced from negative affect ratings following emotion-regulation efforts (e.g., King et al, 2018). Alternatively, identifying strategy effectiveness may be tied to specific events or outcomes also measured via EMA, such as physical health symptoms (e.g., Massey et al, 2009) or alcohol/substance use (e.g., Roos et al, 2020).…”

Building an emotion regulation recommender algorithm for socially anxious individuals using contextual bandits

“…Previous research suggests that different definitions of ER effectiveness may lead to different policies. For example, avoidance-(vs. engagement-) oriented ER strategies are generally perceived as less effective even though they often lead to more positive affect immediately post-ER (Daniel, Baee, Boukhechba, Barnes, & Teachman, 2019). To balance these considerations, the present study optimizes on two indicators of ER effectiveness: perceived effectiveness and post-ER affect.…”