Flexible emotion regulatory selection when coping with COVID-19-related threats during quarantine

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic poses significant emotional challenges that individuals need to select how to regulate. The present study directly examined how during the pandemic, healthy individuals select between regulatory strategies to cope with varying COVID-19-related threats, and whether an adaptive flexible regulatory selection pattern will emerge in this unique threatening global context. Accordingly, this two-study investigation tested how healthy individuals during a strict state issued quarantine, behaviorally select to regulate COVID-19-related threats varying in their intensity. Study 1 created and validated an ecologically relevant set of low and high intensity sentences covering major COVID-19 facets that include experiencing physical symptoms, infection threats, and social and economic consequences. Study 2 examined the influence of the intensity of these COVID-19-related threats, on behavioral regulatory selection choices between disengagement via attentional distraction and engagement via reappraisal. Confirming a flexible regulatory selection conception, healthy individuals showed strong choice preference for engagement reappraisal when regulating low intensity COVID-19-related threats, but showed strong choice preference for disengagement distraction when regulating high intensity COVID-19-related threats. These findings support the importance of regulatory selection flexibility for psychological resilience during a major global crisis.

Adaptive behaviors and vaccination on curbing COVID-19 transmission: Modeling simulations in eight countries

“…Our results indicated that if without adaptive behaviors, the total infection in these countries could be 3.68, 26.16, 15.23, 4.23, 7.26, 1.65, 5.51 and 7.07 times as large as reported. Our estimation of NPI outcome is consistent with existing research ( Teslya et al, 2020 , Anon, 2021 , Shabat et al, 2021 ). Hence it is very necessary to maintain media publicity and government guidance during epidemic transmission.…”

Does Emotion Regulation Flexibility Work? Investigating the Effectiveness of Regulatory Selection Flexibility in Managing Negative Affect

“…Prior research has demonstrated that selecting reappraisal (instead of distraction) for low-intensity emotional stimuli and selecting distraction (instead of reappraisal) for highintensity emotional stimuli confers a neuro-affective benefit, of larger Latent Positive Potential modulation, and (in instances where reappraisal is chosen instead of distraction for low-intensity stimuli) better memory of the emotional information (Ilan et al, 2020;Shafir et al, 2016;Sheppes, 2020). Furthermore, previous studies have found that participants who adopt this pattern of regulatory selections also exhibit better psychological functioning (Fine et al, 2021;Shabat et al, 2021). It is, thus, unexpected that in our trial-level analysis we did not find reappraisal choices to result in lower negative affect than distraction choices for lowintensity images, or distraction choices to result in lower negative affect than reappraisal choices for high-intensity images.…”

“…Consequently, the regulatory selection paradigm operationalizes regulatory selection flexibility as a greater tendency to select distraction in response to high-intensity emotional stimuli, and reappraisal in response to low-intensity emotional stimuli (Fine et al, 2021; Levy-Gigi et al, 2016; Shabat et al, 2021). In the regulatory selection paradigm (Sheppes et al, 2011), participants view a series of negative images and, for each image, are prompted to choose either reappraisal or distraction to help reduce their negative emotion while viewing that image.…”

The Wither or Thrive Model of Resilience: an Integrative Framework of Dynamic Vulnerability and Resilience in the Face of Repeated Stressors During the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…Within the context of the current COVID-19 pandemic, many studies have examined the use of coping strategies to counteract stressful situations (Bendau et al, 2021 ; Panayiotou et al, 2021 ; Prati, 2021 ), but only a minute number have looked at flexible use of coping and regulation strategies (Shabat et al, 2021 ) finding differential use of strategies depending upon the individual and their context. Although the flexible application of our proposed processing mechanisms, including coping and regulation strategies along with the biological and neural mechanisms, within the pandemic context needs further investigation, it becomes evident that these processing mechanisms modulate the influence of the various predictor factors to lead to resultant resilient or vulnerable functioning.…”