Abstract
Beliefs about emotion are clearly relevant for emotion regulation and psychopathology. Yet, understanding the dynamics of emotion beliefs (i.e., the situations and contexts in which beliefs may change over time) remains an important avenue of investigation. The current ecological momentary assessment study (n = 102) assessed nine different beliefs about emotion across a variety of contexts (location, activity, social context, consuming alcohol, eating food, drinking caffeine, subjective emotional experience, feeling invalidated, feeling tired, feeling creative). When participants reported feeling subjectively worse than usual, they also reported their emotion regulation strategies. Results revealed that all of the beliefs except beliefs about longevity (i.e., beliefs that emotions will last “forever”) were associated with at least one contextual factor. In addition, when people reported greater longevity beliefs, they also reported asking “why” (i.e., rumination), attempts to distract themselves, and escape behaviors. Results confirm that beliefs do vary by context, and within-person fluctuations in beliefs are associated with momentary emotion regulation strategies.
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Notes
Note that we originally ran these models separately for (a) physical and consumption contexts (social, location, activity, eating food, drinking alcohol, and drinking caffeine) and (b) psychological contexts (affect, invalidation, creativity, tiredness) but ultimately the results were not different when combined into one model and for the sake of parsimony, we present the overall model.
We thank one of the anonymous reviewers for raising this limitation.
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Veilleux, J.C., Warner, E.A., Chamberlain, K.D. et al. Contextual variation in beliefs about emotion and associated emotion regulation efforts. Motiv Emot 47, 308–322 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-022-09992-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-022-09992-9