Wellbeing Linked With When And How People Manage Emotions

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Reframing how we think about a situation is a common strategy for managing our emotions, but a new study suggests that using this reappraisal strategy in situations we actually have control over may be associated with lower well-being. The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

“Our results caution against a ‘one strategy fits all’ approach, which may be tempting to recommend based on many previous findings regarding reappraisal as a strategy for regulating emotion,” says psychological scientist Peter Koval of Australian Catholic University. “Simply using any given emotion regulation strategy more (or less) in all situations may not lead to the best outcomes—instead, contextually-appropriate emotion regulation may be healthier.”

Recent work on emotion regulation has highlighted the fact that flexibility in using emotion regulation strategies is key to healthy functioning. Koval and his research team decided to investigate how situational context might play a role in the relationship between emotion regulation and well-being in people’s everyday lives.

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