Brief Research Report ARTICLE
Emotion Regulation and the Experience of Future Negative Mood: The Importance of Assessing Social Support
- 1Duke University, United States
Emotion regulation refers to the use of various strategies, such as cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression, to help manage our negative experiences, emotions, and thoughts. Although such emotion regulation often occurs within broader social dynamics and interactions, little is known about how social contexts interact with specific regulation strategies to shape the experience of negative emotions. Using data from 544 young adult university students, we provide initial evidence that habitual use of cognitive reappraisal is associated with lower future experience of depression and anxiety primarily through higher perceived social support. In contrast, expressive suppression is associated with higher future depression and anxiety primarily through lower perceived social support. These patterns are consistent with the importance of interpersonal influences on emotion regulation and suggest that assessment of social support can help elucidate the mechanisms of successfully regulating negative mood.
Keywords: cognitive reappraisal, expressive suppression, Depression, Anxiety, social support
Received: 07 Aug 2018;
Accepted: 02 Nov 2018.
Edited by:Maurizio Codispoti, Università degli Studi di Bologna, Italy
Reviewed by:Stefan Sütterlin, Østfold University College, Norway
Lisa McTeague, Medical University of South Carolina, United States
Copyright: © 2018 D'Arbeloff, Freedy, Knodt, Radtke, Brigidi and Hariri. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Ms. Tracy C. D'Arbeloff, Duke University, Durham, United States, firstname.lastname@example.org