Emotion Regulation within Interpersonal Contexts: Goal-Relevant Outcomes and Spillover Processes

Abstract

Emotion regulation is crucial to navigating emotionally challenging situations, and the ways in which emotions are regulated has important implications for psychological, social and physical well-being. However, although the majority of emotion regulation episodes occur within social interactions, emotion regulation has typically been examined when individuals regulate their emotions in solitude. Moreover, research examining how emotion regulation shapes specific outcomes relevant to the context in which emotion regulation is enacted is rare. The two articles in this thesis advance the emotion regulation literature by (1) examining emotion regulation within important interpersonal contexts, (2) investigating the degree to which emotion regulation shapes important goal-relevant outcomes pivotal to the specific contexts examined, and (3) assessing how these outcomes extend across time and social interactions. Chapter Two examined whether emotional suppression during personal goal pursuit impedes goal strivings and progress. Two longitudinal studies demonstrated that greater use of emotional suppression increased depressed mood, reduced perceived support/closeness, and reduced goal effort, competence and success across time. Chapter Three examined the effects of a broader range of emotion regulation strategies on interpersonal goals by investigating how the use of three categories of emotion regulation during marital conflict shape conflict resolution and, in turn, parent-child responsiveness within a subsequent family activity. Greater disengagement and aversive cognitive perseveration predicted lower conflict resolution, and in turn, poorer parental responsiveness during the family activity. Greater adaptive engagement did not have independent positive effects beyond the effects of these maladaptive strategies. Taken together, the results and methods in the current thesis offers a valuable framework to extend understanding of emotion regulation processes.