Time to reappraise or distract? Temporal and situational context in emotion regulation in daily life

Contextual factors influence how people regulate their everyday emotions. While daily life is rich with situations that evoke emotion regulation, few studies have broadly investigated the role of context in regulating emotions in response to naturally occurring negative events. In this study, we use a structured diary technique - the Experience Sampling Method - to test how different types of contextual factors are associated with using reappraisal and distraction to regulate daily emotions in N = 74 young adults from the general population. The following contextual factors were assessed: time of the day, weekday, tiredness, event stressfulness, and event type. We found that higher stressfulness of negative events was associated with using more distraction within- and between-person and using more reappraisal between persons. Time of day and weekday were not associated with reappraisal or distraction use, suggesting that variation in people’s external environments due to temporal patterns does not influence reappraisal or distraction use. However, tiredness was positively associated with distraction and reappraisal use within persons. Exploratory analyses suggested that experiencing time pressure affords less distraction use, and that experiencing physical discomfort affords less reappraisal use. These findings underscore the dynamic nature of emotion regulation, and the importance of context in everyday emotion regulation