Psychology Research Digest
Emotion - Vol 25, Iss 2
Emotion publishes significant contributions to the study of emotion from a wide range of theoretical traditions and research domains. Emotion includes articles that advance knowledge and theory about all aspects of emotional processes, including reports of substantial empirical studies, scholarly reviews, and major theoretical articles.
Interpersonal emotion regulation: Reflecting on progress and charting the path forward.
Interpersonal emotion regulation occurs when people try to manage their own or others’ feelings or emotional expressions via social interactions. Research on this distinctive form of emotion regulation has grown exponentially over the last 15 years. In this article, we draw from literature across different disciplines, including multiple subdisciplines within psychology (e.g., social, clinical, developmental, organizational, sports), neuroscience, and sociology, to reflect on what is currently known about interpersonal emotion regulation. Our analysis focuses on the process through which interpersonal emotion regulation unfolds, its outcomes, and the development of abilities and difficulties in interpersonal emotion regulation through the lifespan. We also introduce this special issue, which presents a collection of 17 articles that advance our knowledge about these aspects of interpersonal emotion regulation in multiple ways. Finally, we chart the path forward by considering some of the most important challenges and opportunities for researchers aiming to deepen our understanding of interpersonal emotion regulation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 10 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>The dynamics of interpersonal emotion regulation: How sharers elicit desired (but not necessarily helpful) support.
When in distress, people often seek help in regulating their emotions by sharing them with others. Paradoxically, although people perceive such social sharing as beneficial, it often fails to promote emotional recovery. This may be explained by people seeking—and eliciting—emotional support, which offers only momentary relief. We hypothesized that (1) the type of support sharers seek shapes corresponding support provided by listeners, (2) the intensity of sharers’ emotions increases their desire for emotional support and decreases their desire for cognitive support, and (3) listeners’ empathic accuracy promotes support provision that matches sharers’ desires. In 8-min interactions, participants (N = 208; data collected in 2016–2017) were randomly assigned to the role of sharer (asked to discuss an upsetting situation) or listener (instructed to respond naturally). Next, participants watched their video-recorded interaction in 20-s fragments. Sharers rated their emotional intensity and support desires, and listeners rated the sharer’s emotional intensity and their own support provision. First, we found that the desire for support predicted corresponding support provision. Second, the intensity of sharers’ emotions was associated with an increased desire for emotional and cognitive support. Third, the more accurately listeners judged sharers’ emotional intensity, the more they fulfilled sharers’ emotional (but not cognitive) support desire. These findings suggest that people have partial control over the success of their social sharing in bringing about effective interpersonal emotion regulation. People elicit the support they desire at that moment, explaining why they perceive sharing as beneficial even though it may not engender emotional recovery. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 17 Jun 2024 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Why do we engage in everyday interpersonal emotion regulation?
Interpersonal emotion regulation occurs when people influence others’ emotions (extrinsic regulation) or turn to others to influence their own emotions (intrinsic regulation). Research on interpersonal regulation has tended to focus on how people regulate emotions, with little interrogation of why people do it, despite the importance of motives in driving emotion regulation goals and strategy selection. To fill this gap, we conducted a systematic exploration of interpersonal emotion regulation motives, employing a participant-driven approach to document the breadth of motives that people hold across different social contexts. Study 1a (N = 100) provided an initial qualitative examination of motives for both intrinsic and extrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation. Study 1b (N = 399) quantitatively catalogued these motives in recalled social interactions. Study 2 (N = 200), a daily diary study, used the motive taxonomy generated in Studies 1a and 1b to understand why people regulated their own and others’ emotions in everyday social interactions over the course of 14 days. Together, our findings reveal the diversity of intrinsic and extrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation motives and open avenues to further explore motives both as a precursor to and an outcome of regulatory processes in daily life. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 08 Jul 2024 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>I want you to feel bad: Understanding the role of anger in extrinsic interpersonal affect worsening with ecological momentary assessment.
Previous research has demonstrated how people are motivated to induce negative feelings in others, a phenomenon known as extrinsic interpersonal affect worsening. This process has been linked to decreased well-being for those involved in regulating these emotions. However, prior studies have primarily centered on experimental scenarios, neglecting the emotions (such as anger) experienced by those regulating extrinsic affect worsening as possible predictors. To address this gap, a study involving 166 British adults (Mage = 35.09, SD = 12.94) was conducted from the end of 2019 to February 2020. Participants reported their general disposition to engage in extrinsic interpersonal affect worsening and subsequently recorded their levels of momentary anger and momentary extrinsic affect worsening through ecological momentary assessments for 28 days at three different daily time points. The findings unveiled a reciprocal relation with nuanced differences between occurrence and intensity of affect worsening. While for occurrence, we only observed an effect where the occurrence of affect worsening led to a heightened experience of anger in the regulator; for intensity, we observed a detrimental cycle in which anger can serve as both a cause and a consequence of the higher intensity of extrinsic affect worsening. These results are discussed within the context of aggression and abuse theories. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 30 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>You changed my mind: Immediate and enduring impacts of social emotion regulation.
As social creatures, our relationships with other people have tremendous downstream impacts on health and well-being. However, we still know surprisingly little about how our social interactions regulate how we think and feel through life’s challenges. Getting help from other people to change how one thinks about emotional events—known as “social reappraisal”—can be more effective in downregulating negative affect than reappraising on one’s own, but it is unknown whether this regulatory boost from social support persists when people face the same events alone in the future. In a preregistered study of 120 young adults (N = 60 same-gender dyads, gender-split sample) involving in-lab emotion regulation tasks and a follow-up task online approximately 1 day later, we found that participants responded less negatively to aversive images that were socially regulated (i.e., reappraised with the help of a friend) both immediately and over time, as compared to images that had been solo regulated (i.e., reappraised on one’s own) or not regulated (i.e., passively viewed). Interestingly, the regulatory boost from social support observed both in the lab and at follow-up was driven by women dyads. This work highlights one important mechanism explaining how support from others can facilitate emotional well-being: By changing peoples’ lasting impressions of distressing events, interactions with others can help prepare them to cope with future exposure to those events on their own, underscoring how valuable others’ perspectives can be when navigating ongoing emotional stressors. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 11 Sep 2023 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>A multisample investigation of links between individual differences in emotion dysregulation and perceived helpfulness of interpersonal emotion regulation interactions.
Prior theory and research offer competing predictions for associations between intrapersonal emotion (dys)regulation and interpersonal emotion regulation (IER). One possibility is that difficulties recognizing, accepting, or managing one’s emotions might tend to interfere with seeking or benefiting from IER. Alternatively, people who struggle to regulate their emotions by themselves might nevertheless be able to outsource regulatory functions or capitalize on regulatory support effectively, such that benefits of IER might be preserved or even amplified. We conducted secondary analyses of five samples (Ns = 90–381) collected between 2016 and 2020 to examine links between individual differences in intrapersonal emotion (dys)regulation and reported desire for, seeking of, and helpfulness of receiving IER. The samples consisted of students at a public university in California (Samples 1–3), romantic couples recruited predominantly from the Greater San Francisco Bay Area community (Sample 4), and adults reporting difficulties with emotion-related impulsivity enrolled in an online intervention to reduce aggression (Sample 5). Methods varied across samples, including questionnaires, autobiographical recall, nightly diaries, and ecological momentary assessment. Across samples, individual differences in emotion dysregulation, cognitive reappraisal, and expressive suppression were more robustly tied to perceived helpfulness of IER than reported desire for IER. More specifically, emotion dysregulation and suppression use were negatively associated with helpfulness, whereas reappraisal use was positively associated with helpfulness; however, some results were inconsistent across samples. We examine these consistencies and inconsistencies considering differences in sample characteristics and methods. We discuss conceptual and practical implications of these findings alongside strengths, limitations, and future directions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 26 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Interpersonal emotion regulation as a source of positive relationship perceptions: The role of emotion regulation dependence.
The current research unveils a novel mechanism through which interpersonal emotion regulation enhances romantic relationship quality and affective experience. Across three studies, we tested the hypothesis that depending on interactions with a romantic partner for emotion regulation (emotion regulation dependence [ERD]) motivates people to see their partner as more supportive and responsive, and evaluate their partner’s traits more positively. In turn, we expected these elevated perceptions to partially account for the positive effect of ERD on relationship satisfaction and affective experience. In Studies 1 and 2 (N = 395 and 397), experimental manipulations of subjective ERD increased perceived partner support provision, perceived partner responsiveness, and, in Study 2, evaluation of partner traits. In Study 3, a multimethod dyadic study (N = 470), ERD predicted greater perceived partner support provision, perceived partner responsiveness, and positive evaluation of the partner’s traits independently of the partner’s self-reports and objective observers’ assessments of partner behavior. ERD also predicted change over time in these perceptions. These findings were replicated in terms of everyday experiences using daily diary methods (daily n = 9,653). Global and daily ERD indirectly predicted greater relationship satisfaction and mood through positive interpersonal perceptions. Results underscore the importance of intrapsychic processes in interpersonal emotion regulation and suggest that positively biased interpersonal perceptions may be a common pathway through which depending on interactions with romantic partners for emotion regulation improves relationship quality and affective experience. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 20 Jun 2024 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Helping you helps me: Beneficial effects of regulating others’ emotions on well-being and physiological stress.
Improving others’ emotions is cognitively and emotionally demanding, potentially increasing stress levels and decreasing well-being. However, the opposite could also occur: Attempts at improving others’ emotions—that is, affect-improving extrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation—could enhance regulators’ affective well-being and shield against physiological stress because we theorize that engaging in regulatory action to improve others’ emotions can strengthen relationships, activate self-regulation, and elicit prosocial reward. In two studies, we test the consequences on regulators when they help others regulate their emotions. In Study 1, a 7-day diary study (N = 205, 1,434 observations) of significant social interactions, regulators who reported they improved the emotions of others to a greater extent experienced more emotions, both positive and negative, during their interactions. They also experienced an increase in positive affect from pre- to post-diary, no change in negative affect, and better affective well-being at the end of the study. In Study 2, a within-subject observational laboratory study (N = 94, 47 dyads, 235 observations), we found that during the minutes when regulators displayed greater behaviorally coded attempts at improving targets’ emotions, regulators also experienced a corresponding buffering of increased physiological stress measured by pre-ejection period reactivity. These findings empirically support the role of improving others’ emotions in affective well-being over time and the protection against physiological stress when encountering others’ negative emotions. This work also contributes a theoretical framework for understanding why regulating others’ emotions is important for well-being. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 16 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Regulating and emerging: Extrinsic affect improvement and the emergence of leadership.
Emotions are powerful tools through which formal leaders influence their followers, whether by overt emotional displays or deliberate attempts to regulate their own and others’ emotions. This raises the following question: Can the strategic effort to regulate others’ emotions help team members emerge as informal leaders? This work demonstrates that extrinsic emotion regulation—a goal-directed action aimed at regulating team members’ emotions—can enable individuals to rise to informal leadership positions. We hypothesize that team members who improve group emotions emerge as informal leaders. This was tested in two studies. In Study 1 (a lab study on 25 ad hoc groups; n = 100), individuals recognized for improving group affect were chosen as informal leaders. In Study 2 (a field study of 43 student groups that worked together for 6 weeks; n = 141), individuals who self-reported engaging in extrinsic affect-improving were recognized by their peers as fostering positive group affect and subsequently were chosen as the informal leaders of the group. Notably, our findings show that the impact of extrinsic affect-improving was above and beyond that of intrinsic affect-improving. These results underscore the pivotal role of interpersonal emotion regulation, specifically extrinsic affect-improving, in the emergence of informal leadership and highlight its unique contribution to leadership dynamics within teams. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 14 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Interpersonal emotion regulation during relationship conflict: Daily and longitudinal associations with couples’ sexual well-being.
Relationship conflicts, which are common among committed couples, provoke negative emotions with implications for sexual well-being (i.e., satisfaction, desire, low distress). Couples might manage these emotions through extrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation (IER; attempting to influence the emotions of a romantic partner). In a preregistered dyadic, daily diary, and longitudinal study, we examined how four distinct IER strategies—responsiveness, cognitive support, physical presence, hostility—perceived by a romantic partner during relationship conflict related to both partners’ sexual well-being. Over 28 days, community couples (N = 122; recruited between 2022 and 2023) completed brief measures of IER and sexual satisfaction, desire, and distress on days of relationship conflict and full versions of these measures 4 months later. Results may be generalizable to community couples in North America; however, improving the diversity of samples in future research would extend generalizability. Generally, greater perceived responsiveness, cognitive support, and physical presence IER on conflict days were each associated with higher daily sexual satisfaction and desire for couples, while greater perceived hostility was associated with lower daily satisfaction and desire. Greater perceived physical presence averaged across diaries was associated with one’s own increased desire 4 months later. Most effects were similar for men and women; however, on days when women perceived greater responsiveness and cognitive support from partners, their partners reported more sexual distress, but there was no association between men’s perceived IER and partners’ distress. Findings expand models of IER to include sexual well-being and support IER as a target for interventions aimed at promoting sexual well-being. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 15 Aug 2024 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>What do we do to help others feel better? The eight strategies of the Regulating Others’ Emotions Scale (ROES).
Theoretical models of interpersonal extrinsic emotion regulation (the regulation of others’ emotions) recognize many different regulation strategies, yet existing assessments do not assess a wide number of strategies at a granular level. In the present research, we develop the Regulation of Others’ Emotions Scale to capture eight extrinsic emotion regulation strategies (expressive suppression, downward social comparison, humor, distraction, direct action, cognitive reframing, valuing, and receptive listening). Studies 1 (N = 321) and 2 (N = 121) identified eight strategies that differ in how much they require engagement with the target person. Studies 3 (N = 310) and 4 (N = 150 dyads) found evidence for test–retest reliability, structural validity, and correlations with other constructs (i.e., discriminant, convergent, and criterion-related validity). Results suggest that three high-engagement strategies have the strongest links to regulator and target outcomes (such as well-being and relationship quality), with the strongest effects for valuing, then cognitive reframing, and then receptive listening. The discussion focuses on the two broad contributions of the current research: a new instrument assessing multiple strategies and the integration of two different theoretical frameworks for the regulation of others’ emotions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 10 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Out of sight but in mind: Experimentally activating partner representations in daily life buffers against common stressors.
Lab experiments have shown that reminders of romantic partners buffer against stressors. Yet, tightly controlled experiments do not mimic what transpires in people’s actual lives. Thus, an important question is as follows: To what extent do reminders of romantic partners confer affective benefits when they occur “in the wild” as people experience their daily activities? To capture people’s emotional experience in real time, two studies, each spanning 3 months, used event-contingent ecological momentary assessments with a within-subject experimental manipulation. Prior to encountering a stressful event (taking an exam), participants received either a supportive text message from their partner or no message (Studies 1 and 2), or a supportive text message from the research team (Study 2). Receiving supportive partner messages, compared to no messages or messages from the research team, led to less negative affect and greater positive affect, and to less negative affect and greater positive affect about the exam itself. Receiving supportive partner messages had no statistically significant effects on subjective stress. Interestingly, the quality of the partner messages, as coded by independent raters, did not significantly predict the magnitude of the affective benefits. These findings suggest that receiving any supportive partner message, and not necessarily more subtle differences in the quality of the message, may be the key ingredient for these benefits to occur. The present work advances understanding of how the symbolic presence of partners confers affective regulatory benefits in everyday life. Implications for emotion regulation and the utility of integrating perspectives from adult attachment are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 07 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Divergence of children’s friendships and intrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation: Factoring in extrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation strategy use.
As peers become a major part of children’s social life, children seek out and provide support for each other when experiencing strong emotions. We examined children’s intrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation (IER; children’s emotion regulation support seeking from peers) and extrinsic IER (regulation strategies peers provide to help regulate emotion). We examined the extent to which (a) the peers whom children turn to for intrinsic IER diverge from those they consider close friends and (b) extrinsic IER strategy provided by peers is associated with intrinsic IER seeking. Study participants were 131 (67 girls) fourth and fifth grade children from six classrooms from urban settings in a U.S. Midwest state. Based on a peer nomination procedure, children nominated classmates who are their close friends, peers they turn to when sad or angry (i.e., intrinsic IER), and peers who help them regulate sadness or anger through listening and talking (i.e., extrinsic IER). We used social network analysis methods, with classrooms as a unit of analysis, to examine the pattern of ties in the nomination data. We demonstrated that (a) children’s intrinsic IER ties are related to, yet distinct from, close friendship; (b) peers whom children turn to for intrinsic IER differ, to some extent, for sadness versus anger; and (c) extrinsic IER strategy use is significantly associated with intrinsic IER after taking friendship ties into account. The findings suggest that emotion regulatory needs channel children’s social interactions, and extrinsic IER strategy accounts for some of the divergence of intrinsic IER ties from friendship. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 23 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Intrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation strategy use and effectiveness across adulthood: The role of interaction partner age.
One way older adults may be able to maintain emotional well-being despite declining in cognitive ability is through leveraging social resources for intrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation. Additionally, given their increased life experience, older adults might also be particularly well-suited to regulate the emotions of others. To examine age difference in use and effectiveness of intrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation, community adults (N = 290, aged 25–85 years) were prompted 6×/day for 10 days to report their emotional experience, use of intrinsic emotion regulation strategies (including capitalization, social sharing, co-reappraisal, and reminiscing), and interaction partner age. Older age was associated with being less likely to engage in social sharing of negative emotions, and this effect was stable when controlling for negative emotion experience. Otherwise, there were no age differences in how often or how effectively people use intrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation. In terms of interaction partner age, older partner age was only associated with greater likelihood of using co-reappraisal and higher reports of negative emotion after social sharing. In summary, there was no strong evidence for the idea that interpersonal emotion regulation becomes more (or less) common or effective with age. However, though people may be less likely to share negative emotions and be seen as less effective partners for sharing these emotions later in life, older adults are preferable social partners for co-reappraisal potentially due to their life experience. Future work should explore motivational (i.e., attitudes toward negative emotions) and cultural (i.e., perceptions of roles and emotional abilities) mechanisms. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 30 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Interpersonal emotion regulation and depressive symptoms in parent–adolescent dyads: A daily-diary investigation.
Deficient parental extrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation (IER, how people regulate others’ emotions) is a known risk factor for adolescent depression. Although IER and depression development are transactional, dyadic processes, previous work has almost exclusively focused on how parental IER is associated with adolescent depression. The association between parental IER and adolescent depression, and the associations between adolescent IER and adolescent and parental depression have received little attention. Moreover, most studies have focused on the regulation of negative but not positive affect. We address these gaps by examining associations between parent and adolescent IER and depressive symptoms using the actor–partner interdependence model framework. For 28 days, 112 parent–adolescent dyads (12–18-year-old adolescents) completed a dyadic daily diary, reporting their own depressive symptoms and IER strategies employed in response to dyad members’ positive and negative affect. Our results, based on 5,442 data points, show that the use of positive- and negative-affect-worsening IER is associated with more depression in the regulator (be it parent or adolescent). Surprisingly, parents’ use of more negative-affect-improving IER was associated with higher levels of their own and adolescents’ depression. Finally, adolescents’ use of positive-affect-improving IER was associated with their own decreased depression. Overall, parents (vs. adolescents) used more negative- and positive-affect-improving extrinsic IER, whereas adolescents used more positive-affect-worsening extrinsic IER. Our results highlight the importance of using dyadic designs in studying depression and IER, as well as the need to consider who is regulating, the valence of the affect regulated, and the type of strategy used. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 26 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>The interpersonal risks of valuing happiness: Links to interpersonal emotion regulation and close others’ mental health.
While most people want to feel happy, valuing happiness can paradoxically make people unhappy. We propose that such costs may extend to interpersonal contexts, given that valuing happiness may shape how people (i.e., regulators) manage others’ (i.e., targets’) emotions (i.e., extrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation). While valuing happiness could motivate regulators to reduce targets’ distress using effective forms of emotion regulation, it may also push them to be intolerant toward targets’ distress and, in turn, predict worse target well-being. The current investigation examines how two approaches to happiness (i.e., happiness aspiring and happiness concern) predict how regulators manage their children’s and romantic partners’ distress—two fundamental close relationship types that allow us to address the robustness of our findings. We obtained longitudinal reports across a year from socioculturally diverse regulators (N = 279, including partially overlapping groups of 155 parents and 248 partnered individuals) and cross-sectional reports from partners. We found that people who aspired to be happy were more successful at using reappraisal and distraction to manage targets’ emotions, while those who were concerned about happiness were less successful at accepting targets’ emotions (i.e., confirmed by partners’ reports). In turn, more successful use of reappraisal and distraction predicted better target well-being, and less successful acceptance of targets’ emotions predicted poorer target well-being across the next 8 months. These findings underscore the importance of understanding individual differences that shape consequential forms of interpersonal emotion regulation, thereby illuminating who is most likely to help their loved ones and who may be putting them at risk. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 03 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Will you boost my joy or dampen it? Cultural differences in hedonic interpersonal emotion regulation in romantic relationships.
A central tenet guiding contemporary research on emotions is that people are fundamentally motivated to feel good and avoid feeling bad. This principle translates from intrapersonal to extrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation; people not only strive to achieve the hedonic goal of managing their own emotions, but they also help others reach the same goal—the process called hedonic interpersonal emotion regulation (hedonic IER). Here, we challenge the centrality of this principle in romantic relationships by testing a hypothesis that, compared with European Americans, Asians use hedonic IER less and benefit less from their partners’ use of this strategy. Findings across three studies (total N = 2,540) supported this hypothesis. First, European Americans used hedonic IER more than Asians both in positive and negative situations, and, moreover, this cultural difference was mediated by dialectical beliefs about emotions (Study 1). Second, compared with Chinese, European Americans anticipated greater relationship satisfaction in response to their partners’ hedonic IER attempts in both positive and negative situations, and this effect was again mediated by dialectical emotion beliefs (Study 2). Third, compared with Asian couples, European American couples perceived that their partners used hedonic IER more in positive situations. Moreover, when European Americans perceived that their partners used hedonic IER more, they showed greater vagal withdrawal during a positive discussion (i.e., physiological reactivity linked to enhanced social sensitivity and engagement), while Asians did not show this association (Study 3). These findings highlight the critical role of sociocultural contexts in shaping IER and its relational consequences. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 26 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Cultural context shapes the selection and adaptiveness of interpersonal emotion regulation strategies.
In everyday life, we commonly experience, express, and regulate our emotions in interpersonal contexts. However, much of the existing research on utilizing others for modulating one’s emotions has focused on Western, individualistic cultures, leaving a significant gap in understanding how the selection and adaptiveness of interpersonal emotion regulation (IER) strategies vary across cultural contexts. This cross-national comparison study aims to bridge this gap by examining intrinsic IER in 1,187 participants from Turkey and Germany, which are characterized by different cultural norms, values, and socialization practices regarding emotional experience and expression. All participants completed measures of intrinsic IER strategies alongside measures of adaptive outcomes, including depression, anxiety, negative affect, and positive affect. The results revealed cross-national differences between Turkish and German individuals in terms of the intrinsic IER strategies most frequently selected and their associations with depression, anxiety, negative affect, and positive affect. These findings emphasize the significance of cultural context in intrinsic IER and offer insights into the conditions under which these strategies are linked to adaptive outcomes. By recognizing the cultural nuances in how people navigate their emotions via social interactions, clinicians and researchers can develop more culturally sensitive interventions tailored to the specific needs of individuals in diverse cultural contexts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 16 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.
- Carl Jung, The Red Book (2009)
Reach Out