"Nip in the Bud" or "Reap What You Sow"?: Examining How Three Emotion Regulation Strategies Relate to Affect and Cognition

Abstract

Mindfulness and reappraisal are among the most commonly studied emotion regulation strategies. The adaptive benefits of both strategies are supported by a large body of (mostly experimental) research that demonstrates their superiority to suppression in down-regulating negative affect. Yet questions remain about how these three strategies are related to other clinically-relevant outcomes, including positive affect, subjective regulatory effectiveness, and cognitive effort. Furthermore, previous research measures mindfulness as a unidimensional construct, despite it being comprised of two separate components (i.e., present-focused attention and acceptance) that may be associated with divergent affective and cognitive outcomes. Study 1 (experimental design) consisted of N = 192 young adults (ages 18-29, inclusive) who completed executive function tasks before and after an emotion regulation task. During the emotion regulation task, participants viewed several aversive film clips and reported negative affect while using a randomly assigned emotion regulation strategies (i.e., reappraisal, suppression, or mindfulness). Participants also completed trait-level measures of the three emotion regulation strategies. Findings revealed that during the emotion regulation task’s emotion induction phase, participants with greater trait mindfulness were less emotionally reactive to most of the aversive stimuli than those with lower trait mindfulness. With regard to down-regulating negative affect and cognitive task performance, no differences were observed between the emotion regulation conditions. In Study 2 (naturalistic design), N = 216 young adults responded to six questionnaires/day for seven days, answering questions about their recent emotion regulation strategy use, affect, and subjective cognitive effort used for emotion regulation. During a baseline session, participants also completed trait-level measures of the three emotion regulation strategies. Trait and state use of mindfulness and reappraisal were associated with beneficial affective outcomes (e.g., lower negative affect, greater positive affect, greater subjective effectiveness). Both components of mindfulness were also associated with less subjective cognitive effort. In contrast, suppression was generally associated with maladaptive outcomes (e.g., greater negative affect). Overall, findings highlight the numerous benefits associated with regulating emotions using reappraisal and mindfulness, as well as the handful of added benefits uniquely associated with mindfulness, and underscore the value of their inclusion in contemporary psychotherapy protocols.