In plain language
Most research on how people manage their emotions asks them to fill out a one-off questionnaire about what they “usually” do. This study asked a different question: what happens on the days when people actually use a given strategy? Do mindfulness, cognitive reappraisal (reframing a situation to change how you feel), and emotion suppression (hiding what you feel) make day-to-day life feel better or worse?
The researchers had 187 college students complete an online diary every night for 21 days, producing 3,852 days of data, and used multilevel modelling to link each day’s emotion-regulation strategies to that day’s positive and negative feelings. On days when people were more mindful, they felt less negative and more positive emotion. On days when they suppressed their emotions, the opposite pattern appeared. Reappraisal was linked to more positive feelings but, on average, did nothing for negative feelings.
Crucially, the averages hid enormous individual differences. Cognitive reappraisal — usually described as an “adaptive” strategy — conferred no benefit for regulating negative affect in roughly half the sample, and for the youngest participants (aged 17–19) more reappraisal was actually associated with more negative emotion. The authors conclude that no strategy is inherently “good” or “bad”: what works depends on the person and the context, a finding with direct implications for how therapies teach emotion-regulation skills.
Key findings
- 187 college students completed nightly diaries for 21 days, yielding 3,852 days of data analysed with multilevel modelling.
- On days of higher mindfulness, people reported lower negative affect and higher positive affect.
- On days of higher emotion suppression, people reported higher negative affect and lower positive affect — the mirror image of mindfulness.
- Cognitive reappraisal was related to higher daily positive affect but, on average, was unrelated to daily negative affect.
- When all three strategies were entered in the same models, each predicted unique variance in daily emotional well-being.
- Random-slope analyses showed the supposedly adaptive reappraisal strategy conferred no benefit for negative affect in about half the sample, and age moderated its effect: reappraisal was linked to more negative affect for adolescents (17–19) but became beneficial with increasing age.
How to cite
APA
Brockman, R., Ciarrochi, J., Parker, P., & Kashdan, T. (2017). Emotion regulation strategies in daily life: Mindfulness, cognitive reappraisal and emotion suppression. Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, 46(2), 91–113. https://doi.org/10.1080/16506073.2016.1218926
BibTeX
@article{brockman2017emotion,
author = {Brockman, Robert and Ciarrochi, Joseph and Parker, Philip and Kashdan, Todd},
title = {Emotion regulation strategies in daily life: mindfulness, cognitive reappraisal and emotion suppression},
journal = {Cognitive Behaviour Therapy},
year = {2017},
volume = {46},
number = {2},
pages = {91--113},
doi = {10.1080/16506073.2016.1218926}
}
Related work
- All publications by Joseph Ciarrochi (searchable, with free PDFs)
- Process-Based Therapy & Idionomic Analysis
Author: Joseph Ciarrochi (ORCID 0000-0003-0471-8100). Free copy hosted with permission for scholarly use. Please cite the published version via the DOI above.