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Impact of the Global Pandemic Upon Young People's Use of Technology for Emotion Regulation
Abstract
Technology plays an increasingly prominent role in emotional lives. Researchers have begun to study how people use devices to cope with and shape emotions: a phenomenon that has been called Digital Emotion Regulation. We report a study of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic upon young people's digital habits and emotion regulation behaviors. We conducted a two-wave longitudinal survey, collecting data from 154 university students both before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. During the pandemic, participants were subject to increased emotional distress as well as restrictions on movement and social interaction. We present evidence that participants' emotion regulation strategies changed and became more homogeneous during the pandemic, with participants resorting to digital tools when offline strategies were less available, while also becoming more emotionally dependent upon their devices. This study underscores the growing significance of the digital for contemporary emotional experience, and contributes to understanding the potential role for technology in supporting well-being during high-impact events.
... Concerning the pandemic, there is widespread agreement that lockdowns have a negative influence on well-being (Brooks et al. 2020;Lunn et al. 2020). Living in a lockdown during a pandemic has been linked to increased levels of anger, depression, emotional exhaustion, fear of infecting others or becoming infected, insomnia, irritability, loneliness, low mood, and post-traumatic stress disorders (Sprang and Silman 2013;Hawryluck et al. 2004;Lee et al. 2005;Marjanovic et al. 2007;Reynolds et al. 2008;Bai et al. 2004;Tag et al. 2022). Furthermore, anxieties of infection (Kim et al. 2015;Prati et al. 2011), a lack of supplies or not being treated (Wilken et al. 2017), and false or conflicting information (Caleo et al. ...
... 2018) can all cause substantial stress and give rise to new approaches to regulate our emotions (Tag et al. 2022). Furthermore, the psychological impacts of being quarantined may take years to manifest (Brooks et al. 2020). ...
Following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns, the daily lives of software engineers were heavily disrupted as they were abruptly forced to work remotely from home. To better understand and contrast typical working days in this new reality with work in pre-pandemic times, we conducted one exploratory (N = 192) and one confirmatory study (N = 290) with software engineers recruited remotely. Specifically, we build on self-determination theory to evaluate whether and how specific activities are associated with software engineers’ satisfaction and productivity. To explore the subject domain, we first ran a two-wave longitudinal study. We found that the time software engineers spent on specific activities (e.g., coding, bugfixing, helping others) while working from home was similar to pre-pandemic times. Also, the amount of time developers spent on each activity was unrelated to their general well-being, perceived productivity, and other variables such as basic needs. Our confirmatory study found that activity-specific variables (e.g., how much autonomy software engineers had during coding) do predict activity satisfaction and productivity but not by activity-independent variables such as general resilience or a good work-life balance. Interestingly, we found that satisfaction and autonomy were significantly higher when software engineers were helping others and lower when they were bugfixing. Finally, we discuss implications for software engineers, management, and researchers. In particular, active company policies to support developers’ need for autonomy, relatedness, and competence appear particularly effective in a WFH context.
... It was discovered that active social media usage had a higher rate of emotion regulation than passive usage, which provided superior support for rest and recovery [13]. The effect of the pandemic on young people's digital emotion regulation habits has also been studied, and it indicates that while the lockdown made people's emotion regulation practises more uniform, it also increased their reliance on technology and increased their proclivity to use emotion suppression strategies [14]. Altogether, these studies show that a variety of digital technologies are employed by people for emotion regulation in everyday life. ...
Emotion regulation is the process of consciously altering one's affective state, that is the underlying emotional state such as happiness, confidence, guilt, anger etc. The ability to effectively regulate emotions is necessary for functioning efficiently in everyday life. Today, the pervasiveness of digital technology is being purposefully employed to modify our affective states, a process known as digital emotion regulation. Understanding digital emotion regulation can help support the rise of ethical technology design, development, and deployment. This article presents an overview of digital emotion regulation in social media applications, as well as a synthesis of recent research on emotion regulation interventions for social media. We share our findings from analysing state-of-the-art literature on how different social media applications are utilised at different stages in the process of emotion regulation.
... Furthermore, it is important to focus on the accessibility of affective computing technology, e.g., emotion detection systems. The need for mental health support will increase -expressed in the projections of this market to double in size by 2026 -due to the uncertainty during the COVID-19 pandemic and restrictions to our regular lifestyles that have caused interruptions to existing mental health services in many countries (Tag et al., 2022c;Markets and Markets Research Private Ltd., 2021;Yamada et al., 2021). Moreover, it opens further opportunities for accessibility research to develop solutions that can assist with challenges pertaining to mental health and well-being, an emerging trend in accessibility research . ...
... Individuals' multitasking and passive scrolling habits on social media apps have also been investigated in studies revealing how people voluntarily take breaks from social media to mitigate negativity or maintain a sense of equilibrium, as well as highlighting the practice of interpersonal emotion regulation in discussion forums Hossain et al. (2022), Lukoff, Yu, Kientz andHiniker (2018). The majority of studies on how digital media is used to regulate emotions have relied on self-reported questionnaires or a diary-keeping technique Smith et al. (2022), Shen and Cox (2020), Tag, van Berkel, Vargo, Sarsenbayeva, Colasante, Wadley, Webber, Smith, Koval, Hollenstein et al. (2022a), Wadley et al. (2019). Participants in this kind of data collection are required to document their interactions with emotion regulation and technology use over a given period, and then discuss their use of technology and the emotional reactions that accompany it in an interview. ...
Anonymity in social media platforms keeps users hidden behind a keyboard. This absolves users of responsibility, allowing them to engage in online rage, hate speech, and other text-based toxicity that harms online well-being. Recent research in the field of Digital Emotion Regulation (DER) has revealed that indulgence in online toxicity can be a result of ineffective emotional regulation (ER). This, we believe, can be reduced by educating users about the consequences of their actions. Prior DER research has primarily focused on exploring digital emotion regulation practises, identifying emotion regulation using multimodal sensors, and encouraging users to act responsibly in online conversations. While these studies provide valuable insights into how users consciously utilise digital media for emotion regulation, they do not capture the contextual dynamics of emotion regulation online. Through interaction design, this work provides an intervention for the delivery of ER support. It introduces a novel technique for identifying the need for emotional regulation in online conversations and delivering information to users in a way that integrates didactic learning into their daily life. By fostering self-reflection in periods of intensified emotional expression, we present a graph-based framework for on-the-spot emotion regulation support in online conversations. Our findings suggest that using this model in a conversation can help identify its influential threads/nodes to locate where toxicity is concentrated and help reduce it by up to 12\%. This is the first study in the field of DER that focuses on learning transfer by inducing self-reflection and implicit emotion regulation.
Smartphones have gotten under public scrutiny due to their ostensible negative impact on users' well-being. Nonetheless, users and related work report positive aspects of smartphones, too. We investigated this discrepancy through the prism of the emotional user-smartphone relationship by having people write love/breakup letters to their smartphones. We gathered 82 letters - 42 before and 40 during the COVID-19 pandemic. We found a mixed nature regarding the distribution of love and breakup letters and associated emotions based on the revisited OCC-model of emotions - with a slight shift towards the negative emotional spectrum during the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, we performed an extensive qualitative analysis of 819 user statements extracted from the letters, resulting in a connection of emotions to 17 smartphone features and eight themes of real-life consequences of smartphone use. We then identified eight common patterns of this connection, classified as smartphone roles. The collected letters mostly model a complex user-smartphone relationship, comprising different roles depending on users' inner and outer context. We discuss how HCI could help in shaping the complex user-smartphone relationship in future research and suggest supporting a healthy balance between users' daily life and smartphone use.
Smartphone use has become an indispensable aspect of daily life for billions of people. Increasingly, researchers are examining the impact of smartphone use upon psychological well-being. However, little research has investigated how people deliberately use their smartphones to shape affective states; in other words, how smartphones are used as tools to support everyday emotion regulation. In this paper, we report a study that uses quantitative (experience sampling) and qualitative (semi-structured interview) methods to examine when and how people use smartphones to regulate emotions in everyday life, and the associated psychological consequences. Participants report spending a significant amount of time using their smartphones for emotion regulation, in particular to cope with unpleasant feelings such as boredom and stress. They report that smartphone-mediated emotion regulation is effective for attaining desired affective states. However, the perceived emotional benefits of smartphone emotion regulation do not emerge in lagged analyses predicting changes in momentary mood across a few hours, suggesting that emotional benefits may be transient or may reflect self-report biases. Participants discuss their perceptions of smartphone-supported emotion regulation in relation to smartphone addiction. This study provides evidence on how people use their smartphones for emotion regulation, and contributes to better understanding the complex relationship between smartphone use and emotional wellbeing.
Emotion has long been acknowledged as an important part of technology user experience. More recently, research has begun to catalogue ways in which people use technology to manage and shape emotion. These have been characterised as emerging digital forms of a category of behaviour known to psychologists as emotion regulation. Since digital emotion regulation may impact wellbeing, it is important to explore ways of studying it; however most studies to date have used self-report data and it remains unknown whether this behaviour can be studied objectively. To address this gap, we present findings from a field study that measured how joy unfolds during everyday smartphone use. We built a custom Android application that uses the front-facing camera to register emotions from facial features of 20 individuals, collected over 14 days. Our analysis of 266,002 observations yielded striking non-random patterns, which we analyse as potential indicators of digital emotion regulation. This study is an important first step towards assessing how digital emotion regulation unfolds in naturalistic settings. Our findings have implications for the design of technology and in particular, interventions for psychological wellbeing.
Objective:
The COVID-19 pandemic made Working From Home (WFH) the new way of working. This study investigates the impact that family-work conflict, social isolation, distracting environment, job autonomy, and self-leadership have on employees' productivity, work engagement, and stress experienced when WFH during the pandemic.
Methods:
This cross-sectional study analyzed data collected through an online questionnaire completed by 209 employees WFH during the pandemic. The assumptions were tested using hierarchical linear regression.
Results:
Employees' family-work conflict and social isolation were negatively related, while self-leadership and autonomy were positively related, to WFH productivity and WFH engagement. Family-work conflict and social isolation were negatively related to WFH stress, which was not affected by autonomy and self-leadership.
Conclusion:
Individual- and work-related aspects both hinder and facilitate WFH during the COVID-19 outbreak.
This N = 173,426 social science dataset was collected through the collaborative COVIDiSTRESS Global Survey-an open science effort to improve understanding of the human experiences of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic between 30th March and 30th May, 2020. The dataset allows a cross-cultural study of psychological and behavioural responses to the Coronavirus pandemic and associated government measures like cancellation of public functions and stay at home orders implemented in many countries. The dataset contains demographic background variables as well as measures of Asian Disease Problem, perceived stress (PSS-10), availability of social provisions (SPS-10), trust in various authorities, trust in governmental measures to contain the virus (OECD trust), personality traits (BFF-15), information behaviours, agreement with the level of government intervention, and compliance with preventive measures, along with a rich pool of exploratory variables and written experiences. A global consortium from 39 countries and regions worked together to build and translate a survey with variables of shared interests, and recruited participants in 47 languages and dialects. Raw plus cleaned data and dynamic visualizations are available.
Fueled by the pervasion of tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams, the usage of text-based communication in
distributed teams has grown massively in organizations. This brings distributed teams many advantages,
however, a critical shortcoming in these setups is the decreased ability of perceiving, understanding and
regulating emotions. This is problematic because better team members’ abilities of emotion management
positively impact team-level outcomes like team cohesion and team performance, while poor abilities diminish
communication flow and well-being. Leveraging chatbot technology in distributed teams has been recognized
as a promising approach to reintroduce and improve upon these abilities. In this article we present three chatbot
designs for emotion management for distributed teams. In order to develop these designs, we conducted
three participatory design workshops which resulted in 153 sketches. Subsequently, we evaluated the designs
following an exploratory evaluation with 27 participants. Results show general stimulating effects on emotion
awareness and communication efficiency. Further, they report emotion regulation and increased compromise
facilitation through social and interactive design features, but also perceived threats like loss of control. With
some design features adversely impacting emotion management, we highlight design implications and discuss
chatbot design recommendations for enhancing emotion management in teams
Today eSports gaming is enjoying growing popularity in the world and much attention from various research areas, including CSCW. eSports gaming is a highly competitive environment commonly associated with negative emotions such as anxiety and stress. However, little attention has been paid to emotion regulation in eSports gaming. In this study, we empirically investigated how players experience emotion and regulate emotions in League of Legends, one of the largest eSports games today. We identify four emotive factors, as well as emotion regulation strategies that players deploy to manage the emotions of their selves, teammates, and opponents. We further report on how they use emotion regulation in emotional self-care and emotional leadership. Building upon this set of findings, we discuss how the competitive eSports gaming context conditions emotion regulation in League of Legends, foreground emotion regulation expertise in competitive gaming, and derive implications for designing emotion regulation technologies. CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Collaborative and social computing → Empirical studies in collaborative and social computing • Human-centered computing → Human computer interaction (HCI) → Empirical studies in HCI
The provision and usage of online and e-learning system is becoming the main challenge for many universities during COVID-19 pandemic. E-learning system such as Blackboard has several fantastic features that would be valuable for use during this COVID-19 pandemic. However, the successful usage of e-learning system relies on understanding the adoption factors as well as the main challenges that face the current e-learning systems. There is lack of agreement about the critical challenges and factors that shape the successful usage of e-learning system during COVID-19 pandemic; hence, a clear gap has been identified in the knowledge on the critical challenges and factors of e-learning usage during this pandemic. Therefore, this study aims to explore the critical challenges that face the current e-learning systems and investigate the main factors that support the usage of e-learning system during COVID-19 pandemic. This study employed the interview method using thematic analysis through NVivo software. The interview was conducted with 30 students and 31 experts in e-learning systems at six universities from Jordan and Saudi Arabia. The findings of this study offer useful suggestions for policy-makers, designers, developers and researchers, which will enable them to get better acquainted with the key aspects of the e-learning system usage successfully during COVID-19 pandemic.
Latent profile analysis (LPA) is a categorical latent variable approach that focuses on identifying latent subpopulations within a population based on a certain set of variables. LPA thus assumes that people can be typed with varying degrees of probabilities into categories that have different configural profiles of personal and/or environmental
attributes. Within this article, we (a) review the existing applications of LPA within past vocational behavior research; (b) illustrate best practice procedures in a non-technical way of how to use LPA methodology, with an illustrative example of identifying different latent profiles of heavy work investment (i.e., working compulsively, working excessively,
and work engagement); and (c) outline future research possibilities in vocational behavior research. By reviewing 46 studies stemming from central journals of the field, we identified seven distinct topics that have already been investigated by LPA (e.g., job and organizational attitudes and behaviors, work motivation, career-related attitudes and
orientations, vocational interests). Together with showing descriptive statistics about how LPA has been conducted in past vocational behavior research, we illustrate and derive best-practice recommendations for future LPA research. The review and "how to" guide can be helpful for all researchers interested in conducting LPA studies.
In the current digital age, emotional support is increasingly received through digital devices. However, virtually all studies assessing the benefits of emotional support have focused on in-person support. Using an experience sampling methodology, we assessed participants’ negative emotions, digital and in-person support for those emotions, and success in regulating them three times per day for 14 days, thus covering a wide range of digital support scenarios (N = 164 participants with 6,530 collective measurement occasions). We also considered whether participants were alone versus with others at the time of their negative emotion and higher versus lower in social avoidance as plausible moderators of when digital support was utilized and effective. We expected more pronounced use and efficacy of digital support when participants were alone and higher in trait social avoidance. However, digital support was used and perceived as effective for regulating negative emotions regardless of these factors and its beneficial effects were on par with those of traditional in-person support. The unique benefits of digital support may not be restricted to socially isolated or socially avoidant users. These findings are timely given the widespread anxiety and isolation under the current COVID-19 pandemic. If transcending time and space with digital emotional support is the new norm, the good news is that it seems to be working.
At the end of December 2019, a novel coronavirus, 2019-nCoV, caused an outbreak of pneumonia spreading from Wuhan, Hubei province, to the whole country of China, which has posed great threats to public health and attracted enormous attention around the world. To date, there are no clinically approved vaccines or antiviral drugs available for these human coronavirus infections. Intensive research on the novel emerging human infectious coronaviruses is urgently needed to elucidate their route of transmission and pathogenic mechanisms, and to identify potential drug targets, which would promote the development of effective preventive and therapeutic countermeasures. Herein, we describe the epidemic and etiological characteristics of 2019-nCoV, discuss its essential biological features, including tropism and receptor usage, summarize approaches for disease prevention and treatment, and speculate on the transmission route of 2019-nCoV.
Research shows that environmental factors such as ambient noise and cold ambience can render users situationally impaired, adversely affecting interaction with mobile devices. However, an internal factor which is known to negatively impact cognitive abilities – stress – has not been systematically investigated in terms of its impact on mobile interaction. In this paper, we report a study where we use the Trier Social Stress Test to induce stress on participants, and investigate its effect on three aspects of mobile interaction: target acquisition, visual search, and text entry. We find that stress reduces completion time and accuracy during target acquisition tasks, as well as completion time during visual search tasks. Finally, we are able to directly contrast the magnitude of these effects to previously published effects of environmentally-caused impairments. Our work contributes to the growing body of literature on situational impairments.
Emotion regulation (ER) is an important skill for well-being. Cognitive reappraisal is a goal-oriented cognitive change strategy. Acceptance involves decentering from immediate habits of reactivity, observing moment-to-moment shifts in thoughts, emotions, and sensations. These two regulation strategies are thought to have different effects on emotion; however, no study has examined the differential effects of reappraisal and acceptance on behavioral, autonomic, and brain responses in the context of ideographic personally salient negative self-beliefs. Thirty-five right-handed, healthy adults were presented idiographic negative self-beliefs embedded in autobiographical scripts. We measured negative emotion ratings, autonomic psychophysiology, and functional magnetic resonance imaging blood oxygen-level dependent responses while participants read neutral statements, reacted to their own negative self-beliefs, and implemented reappraisal and acceptance strategies. Compared with react, reappraisal resulted in significantly lesser negative emotion and respiration rate; no differences in heart rate and skin conductance level; greater brain responses implicated in cognitive control, language, and social cognition; and lesser amygdala responses. Compared with react, acceptance resulted in significantly lesser negative emotion, respiration rate, and heart rate; no difference in skin conductance level; and greater brain responses in networks implicated in cognitive control and attention. Compared with acceptance, reappraisal resulted in significantly lesser negative emotion; no difference in respiration rate and skin conductance level; higher heart rate; greater brain responses in brain regions implicated in cognitive control; and lesser brain responses in amygdala. Reappraisal is more effective than acceptance in down-regulating negative emotion, but may require greater recruitment of autonomic, cognitive, and brain resources.
To determine the number of clusters in the clustering analysis that has a broad range of applied sciences, such as physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, economics etc., many methods have been proposed in the literature. The aim of this paper is to determine the number of clusters of a dataset in a model-based clustering by using an Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). In this study, the AHP model has been created by using the information criteria Akaike's Information Criterion (AIC), Approximate Weight of Evidence (AWE), Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC), Classification Likelihood Criterion (CLC), and Kullback Information Criterion (KIC). The achievement of the proposed approach has been tested on common real and synthetic datasets. The proposed approach based on the corresponding information criteria has produced accurate results. The currently produced results have been seen to be more accurate than those corresponding to the information criteria.
Research has shown a link between emotion regulation (ER) repertoire, the range of ER strategies an individual employs and the degree to which they rely on them, and well-being. However, this advancement is hindered by the lack of a single measurement tool capable of assessing multiple ER strategies on a common scale. The current paper reports on two studies utilizing the Regulation of Emotion Systems Survey (RESS), a new self-report measure allowing for variable- and person-centered analyses of six common ER strategies (Distraction, Rumination, Reappraisal, Suppression, Engagement, Arousal Control). Study 1 (n = 1582) included scale development, validation, and Latent Profile Analysis (LPA). Results showed the RESS is a valid, reliable, and effective measure. Three profiles were identified (Average, Suppression Propensity, Engagement Propensity). The Average group reported greater psychosocial functioning than the Suppression group. Study 2 (n = 100) LPA indicated 4 profiles (Average, Suppression Propensity, Engagement Propensity, Multi-strategy) and assessed the effects of emotionality. The Average group reported lower emotional awareness than the Engagement and Multi-Strategy groups. Profiles did not differ on frequency or intensity of emotions. Findings demonstrated the utility of the RESS and confirm the importance of ER repertoires to better understand connections between ER and well-being.
Recent studies have begun to document the diversity of ways people regulate their emotions. However, one unanswered question is why people regulate their emotions as they do in everyday life. In the present research, we examined how social context and goals influence strategy selection in daily high points and low points. As expected, suppression was particularly tied to social features of context: it was used more when others were present, especially non-close partners, and when people had instrumental goals, especially more interpersonal ones (e.g., avoid conflict). Distraction and reappraisal were used more when regulating for hedonic reasons (e.g., to feel better), but these strategies were also linked to certain instrumental goals (e.g., getting work done). When contra-hedonic regulation occurred, it primarily took the form of dampening positive emotion during high points. Suppression was more likely to be used for contra-hedonic regulation, whereas reappraisal and distraction were used more for pro-hedonic regulation. Overall, these findings highlight the social nature of emotion regulation and underscore the importance of examining regulation in both positive and negative contexts.
Multiple emotion regulation strategies have been identified and found to differ in their effectiveness at decreasing negative emotions. One reason for this might be that individual strategies are associated with differing levels of cognitive demand and require distinct patterns of visual attention to achieve their effects. In the current study, we tested this hypothesis in a sample of psychiatrically healthy participants (n = 25) who attempted to down-regulate negative emotion to photographs from the International Affective Picture System using cognitive reappraisal or distraction. Eye movements, pupil dilation, and subjective reports of negative emotionality were obtained for reappraisal, distraction, unpleasant passive viewing, and neutral passive viewing conditions. Behavioral results indicated that reappraisal and distraction successfully decreased self-reported negative affect relative to unpleasant passive viewing. Successful down regulation of negative affect was associated with different patterns of visual attention across regulation strategies. During reappraisal, there was an initial increase in dwell time to arousing scene regions and a subsequent shift away from these regions during later portions of the trial, whereas distraction was associated with reduced total dwell time to arousing interest areas throughout the entire stimulus presentation. Pupil dilation was greater for reappraisal than distraction or unpleasant passive viewing, suggesting that reappraisal may recruit more effortful cognitive control processes. Furthermore, greater decreases in self-reported negative emotion were associated with a lower proportion of dwell time within arousing areas of interest. These findings suggest that different emotion regulation strategies necessitate different patterns of visual attention to be effective and that individual differences in visual attention predict the extent to which individuals can successfully decrease negative emotion using reappraisal and distraction.
Music is frequently used to support emotional health and well-being, with emotion regulation the most commonly reported mechanism. Music-based emotion regulation has not yet been extensively investigated within the broader emotion regulation framework. The effects of music-based emotion regulation on emotional state and well-being outcomes have also rarely been tested in real time. The current study aimed to determine the consequences of emotion regulation strategies used during music listening, in terms of hedonic outcomes, and associations with emotional health and well-being. A sample of 327 participants used the MuPsych application (app), a mobile experience sampling methodology designed for the real-time and ecologically-valid measurement of personal music listening. Results revealed that using music to regulate a recently experienced emotion (response-focused strategies) yielded the greatest hedonic success, but was associated with poorer emotional health and well-being. Music-based emotion regulation differed from non-music emotion regulation findings in several key ways, suggesting that music-based emotion regulation does not occur in accordance with the process model. This supported the notion that personal music listening is utilized as an independent regulatory resource, allowing listeners to reach specific emotional goals. Regulation strategies are selected to reach a desired hedonic outcome, based on initial mood, and influenced by emotional health and well-being.
Despite the growing research on emotion regulation, the empirical evidence for normative age-related emotion regulation patterns is
rather divergent. From a life-span perspective, normative age changes in emotion regulation may be more salient applying the same methodological
approach on a broad age range examining both growth and decline during development. In addition, emotion-specific developmental
patterns might show differential developmental trends. The present study examined age differences in seven emotion regulation
strategies from early adolescence (age 11) to middle adulthood (age 50) for the three emotions of sadness, fear, and anger. The results
showed specific developmental changes in the use of emotion regulation strategies for each of the three emotions. In addition, results
suggest age-specific increases and decreases in many emotion regulation strategies, with a general trend to increasing adaptive emotion
regulation. Specifically, middle adolescence shows the smallest emotion regulation strategy repertoire. Gender differences appeared for
most emotion regulation strategies. The findings suggest that the development of emotion regulation should be studied in an emotionspecific
manner, as a perspective solely on general emotion regulation either under- or overestimates existing emotion-specific developmental
changes.
Recovery is a necessary factor in avoiding work-related strain and in feeling prepared for the next day of work. In order for recovery to be successful, an individual must experience psychological detachment from work, relaxation, mastery experiences and a sense of control, all of which have been argued to be assisted by digital game use. However, it is unclear whether these associations will be greater for certain digital game genres, or whether this would extend to other recovery-related outcomes, for instance work home interference (WHI), where the stress from work interferes with home-life. These factors may be vital in determining whether interventions aimed at improving recovery using digital games would be effective, and what form these should take. The present research surveyed 491 participants and found that the total number of hours spent playing digital games per week was positively correlated with overall recovery. Correlations varied with genre, highlighting the importance of game characteristics in this relationship: first person shooters and action games were most highly correlated with recovery. Moreover, digital game use was not related to a reduction in work-home interference. When restricting the analysis to gamers who report to have developed online relationships, online social support mediated the relationship between digital game use and recovery. Results are discussed in terms of how digital games may be utilised to improve recovery and reduce work-related stress.
Contemporary emotion regulation research emphasizes intrapersonal processes such as cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression, but people experiencing affect commonly choose not to go it alone. Instead, individuals often turn to others for help in shaping their affective lives. How and under what circumstances does such interpersonal regulation modulate emotional experience? Although scientists have examined allied phenomena such as social sharing, empathy, social support, and prosocial behavior for decades, there have been surprisingly few attempts to integrate these data into a single conceptual framework of interpersonal regulation. Here we propose such a framework. We first map a "space" differentiating classes of interpersonal regulation according to whether an individual uses an interpersonal regulatory episode to alter their own or another person's emotion. We then identify 2 types of processes-response-dependent and response-independent-that could support interpersonal regulation. This framework classifies an array of processes through which interpersonal contact fulfills regulatory goals. More broadly, it organizes diffuse, heretofore independent data on "pieces" of interpersonal regulation, and identifies growth points for this young and exciting research domain. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved).
Implicit theories of emotion-assumptions about whether emotions are fixed (entity theory) or malleable (incremental theory)-have previously been shown to influence affective outcomes over time. We examined whether implicit theories of emotion also relate to the immediate regulation of negative affect. Consistent with our hypotheses, we found that the more students endorsed an entity theory of emotion, the more discomfort they reported while watching an aversive movie clip, the more they avoided affective stimuli in this movie clip, the more negative affect they reported after the clip, and the less likely they were to watch the same clip again to learn about its ending. These findings suggest that implicit theories of emotion might produce poor affective outcomes immediately as well as over time. They also offer insight into why some people avoid negative affect while others confront it.
The paradox of distress expression is that expression of negative feelings is both a sign of distress and a possible means of coping with that distress. This article describes research illustrating the paradox of distress expression. It reviews evidence concerning 3 possible mechanisms by which expression might alleviate distress, focusing on the role of expression in (a) reducing distress about distress, (b) facilitating insight, and (c) affecting interpersonal relationships in a desired way. The authors conclude by highlighting the circumstances under which expression is most likely to be adaptive. Overall, the authors argue that expression of negative feelings is adaptive to the extent that it leads to some kind of resolution involving the source or significance of distress. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The global pandemic and the uncertainty if and when life will return to normality have motivated a series of studies on human mental health. This research has elicited evidence for increasing numbers of anxiety, depression, and overall impaired mental well-being. But, the global COVID-19 pandemic has also created new opportunities for research into quantifying human emotions: remotely, contactless, in everyday life. The ubiquitous computing community has long been at the forefront of developing, testing, and building user-facing systems that aim at quantifying human emotion. However, rather than aiming at more accurate sensing algorithms, it is time to critically evaluate whether it is actually possible and in what ways it could be beneficial for technologies to be able to detect user emotions. In this workshop, we bring together experts from the fields of Ubiquitous Computing, Human-Computer Interaction, and Psychology to-long-overdue-merge their expertise and ask the fundamental questions: how do we make sense of emotion-sensing, can and should we quantify human emotions?
Emotions have a significant impact on our decision-making, learning, awareness, social interactions, and mental and physical health. Even though large efforts have been put into quantifying human emotions, their subjectivity, context-dependence, and complexity render them as being almost unpredictable. However, while different streams of research in pervasive computing and psychology have made significant progress in the quantification of emotions, the most successful research results come out of controlled laboratory studies. In this article, we present a retrospective of a series of in-the-wild studies through the lens of human emotions. We are looking at the weaknesses and strengths of traditional research methods and present lessons learned. We furthermore call for a readjustment of research rigor and describe potential new research designs specific to out-of-the-lab studies.
People routinely regulate their emotions in order to function more effectively at work, to behave more appropriately in social situations, or simply to feel better. Recently, researchers have begun to examine how people shape their affective states using digital technologies, such as smartphones. In this article, we discuss the emergence of digital emotion regulation, both as a widespread behavioral phenomenon and a new cross-disciplinary field of research. This field bridges two largely distinct areas of enquiry: (a) psychological research into how and why people regulate their emotions, which has yet to systematically explore the role of digital technology, and (b) computing research into how digital technologies impact users’ emotions, which has yet to integrate psychological theories of emotion regulation. We argue that bringing these two areas into better contact will benefit both and will facilitate a deeper understanding of the nature and significance of digital emotion regulation.
Emotion regulation (ER) repertoire—the range of different ER strategies an individual utilizes across situations—is assumed to enable more adaptive ER and greater well-being. ER repertoire has been operationalized by a quantitative index (sum of ER strategies across situations) or by applying a person-centered approach to global self-reports of dispositional ER. We aimed to assess ER repertoire in daily life by using an experience sampling methodology (ESM) and a person-centered approach that could account for nested data. We used multilevel latent profile analyses of ESM data (N = 179, 9–10 prompts per day over 21 days) to (a) group the occasions into latent profiles of momentary ER strategies, (b) group individuals whose distributions of ER profiles differed across occasions into latent classes, and (c) examine well-being correlates of class membership at the person level. At the occasion level, we identified nine ER profiles that differed in degree of use (e.g., no use of any vs. strong use of all strategies) and in specific combinations of strategies (e.g., situation selection and acceptance vs. suppression and ignoring). At the person level, we identified 5 classes of individuals differing in the degree to which they used various momentary ER profiles versus one predominant profile across situations. Well-being was highest for individuals who used multiple ER profiles of active strategies and lowest for individuals who used ER profiles focused on suppression. Hence, both ER repertoire width and the specific make-up of the ER repertoire were relevant for the relation between ER repertoire and well-being.
Given recent attention to emotion regulation as a potentially unifying function of diverse symptom presentations, there is a need for comprehensive measures that adequately assess difficulties in emotion regulation among adults. This paper (a) proposes an integrative conceptualization of emotion regulation as involving not just the modulation of emotional arousal, but also the awareness, understanding, and acceptance of emotions, and the ability to act in desired ways regardless of emotional state; and (b) begins to explore the factor structure and psychometric properties of a new measure, the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS). Two samples of undergraduate students completed questionnaire packets. Preliminary findings suggest that the DERS has high internal consistency, good test–retest reliability, and adequate construct and predictive validity.
The spontaneous recognition of emotional states and personality traits of individuals has been puzzling researchers for years whereas pertinent studies demonstrating the progress in the field, despite their diversity, are still encouraging. This work surveys the most well-known research studies and the state-of-the-art on affect recognition domain based on smartphone acquired data, namely smartphone embedded sensors and smartphone usage. Inevitably, supplementary modalities employed in many eminent studies are also reported here for the sake of completeness. Nevertheless, the intention of the survey is threefold; firstly to document all the to-date relevant literature on affect recognition through smartphone modalities, secondly to argue for the full potential of smartphone use in the inference of affect, and thirdly to demonstrate the current research trends towards mobile affective computing.
This article explores how mobile phones function as an affective technology for young adults, by adapting the self-expansion model to understand attachment to mobile phones. In an online survey, 272 smart phone users reported on their recalled responses to loss/separation from their mobile phone (not by choice), as well as their use of the mobile phone for self-expansion. Results show that self-expansion via mobile phone was associated with greater inclusion of the mobile phone in the self-concept and greater subjective well-being. Most respondents reported negative feelings, such as loneliness/disconnection, anxiety, and boredom, when without their mobile phone, but others felt relieved to be out of touch with others. The use of the mobile phone for self-expansion was associated with more negative emotion and less positive emotion (relief) in response to loss/separation from the phone. Interpretations of the findings are discussed.
Emotion regulation involves the pursuit of desired emotional states (i.e., emotion goals) in the service of superordinate motives. The nature and consequences of emotion regulation, therefore, are likely to depend on the motives it is intended to serve. Nonetheless, limited attention has been devoted to studying what motivates emotion regulation. By mapping the potential benefits of emotion to key human motives, this review identifies key classes of motives in emotion regulation. The proposed taxonomy distinguishes between hedonic motives that target the immediate phenomenology of emotions, and instrumental motives that target other potential benefits of emotions. Instrumental motives include behavioral, epistemic, social, and eudaimonic motives. The proposed taxonomy offers important implications for understanding the mechanism of emotion regulation, variation across individuals and contexts, and psychological function and dysfunction, and points to novel research directions.
© 2015 by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc.
One of the fastest growing areas within psychology is the field of emotion regulation. However, enthusiasm for this topic continues to outstrip conceptual clarity, and there remains considerable uncertainty as to what is even meant by “emotion regulation.” The goal of this review is to examine the current status and future prospects of this rapidly growing field. In the first section, I define emotion and emotion regulation and distinguish both from related constructs. In the second section, I use the process model of emotion regulation to selectively review evidence that different regulation strategies have different consequences. In the third section, I introduce the extended process model of emotion regulation; this model considers emotion regulation to be one type of valuation, and distinguishes three emotion regulation stages (identification, selection, implementation). In the final section, I consider five key growth points for the field of emotion regulation.
Research suggests that emotions and emotion regulation processes can influence both the sensory (e.g., intensity) and the affective (unpleasantness) components of pain. The purpose of this study was to investigate the factor structure and validity of the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS; Gratz and Roemer, 2004) in medical sample with persistent pain.
Data were collected from 207 chronic pain patients (82.6% female; mean age = 51.96). We applied confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to test measurement model of emotion dysregulation and CFA with covariates to test construct and convergent validity of the DERS.
The original factor structure of the DERS was not supported in our medical sample. However, after some modifications the DERS yielded good fit. Validity of the DERS was confirmed. All the subscales had significant relationship with depression measure, and all the subscales except one correlated with Difficulties in Identifying Feelings component of alexithymia.
The DERS proved to be an adequate measure of clinically relevant dimensions of emotional dysregulation in chronic pain patients.
The field of emotion regulation has now come of age. However, enthusiasm for the topic continues to outstrip conceptual clarity. In this article, I review the state of the field. I do this by asking-and attempting to succinctly answer-10 fundamental questions concerning emotion regulation, ranging from what emotion regulation is, to why it matters, to how we can change it. I conclude by considering some of the challenges that confront this rapidly growing field. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved).
The emerging field of emotion regulation studies how individuals influence which emotions they have, when they have them, and how they experience and express them. This review takes an evolutionary perspective and characterizes emotion in terms of response tendencies. Emotion regulation is defined and distinguished from coping, mood regulation, defense, and affect regulation. In the increasingly specialized discipline of psychology, the field of emotion regulation cuts across traditional boundaries and provides common ground. According to a process model of emotion regulation, emotion may be regulated at five points in the emotion generative process: (a) selection of the situation, (b) modification of the situation, (c) deployment of attention, (d) change of cognitions, and (e) modulation of responses. The field of emotion regulation promises new insights into age-old questions about how people manage their emotions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved)
Past research has shown that rumination exacerbates dysphoric mood whereas distraction attenuates it. This research examined
whether the practice of mindfulness meditation could reduce dysphoric mood even more effectively than distraction. A dysphoric
mood was induced in 139 female and 38 male participants who were then randomly assigned to a rumination, distraction, or meditation
condition. As predicted, participants instructed to meditate reported significantly lower levels of negative mood than those
in either of the two other conditions. Distraction was associated with a lessening of dysphoric mood when compared to rumination
but was not as effective as mindfulness meditation. The implications of these findings are discussed.
The present meta-analysis investigated the effectiveness of strategies derived from the process model of emotion regulation in modifying emotional outcomes as indexed by experiential, behavioral, and physiological measures. A systematic search of the literature identified 306 experimental comparisons of different emotion regulation (ER) strategies. ER instructions were coded according to a new taxonomy, and meta-analysis was used to evaluate the effectiveness of each strategy across studies. The findings revealed differences in effectiveness between ER processes: Attentional deployment had no effect on emotional outcomes (d(+) = 0.00), response modulation had a small effect (d(+) = 0.16), and cognitive change had a small-to-medium effect (d(+) = 0.36). There were also important within-process differences. We identified 7 types of attentional deployment, 4 types of cognitive change, and 4 types of response modulation, and these distinctions had a substantial influence on effectiveness. Whereas distraction was an effective way to regulate emotions (d(+) = 0.27), concentration was not (d(+) = -0.26). Similarly, suppressing the expression of emotion proved effective (d(+) = 0.32), but suppressing the experience of emotion or suppressing thoughts of the emotion-eliciting event did not (d(+) = -0.04 and -0.12, respectively). Finally, reappraising the emotional response proved less effective (d(+) = 0.23) than reappraising the emotional stimulus (d(+) = 0.36) or using perspective taking (d(+) = 0.45). The review also identified several moderators of strategy effectiveness including factors related to the (a) to-be-regulated emotion, (b) frequency of use and intended purpose of the ER strategy, (c) study design, and (d) study characteristics.
Aim of this study was to study relationships between cognitive emotion regulation strategies and depressive symptoms. Five specific samples (ranging from adolescents to elderly) were compared on their reported use of cognitive emotion regulation strategies (Rumination, Catastrophizing, Self-blame, Other-blame, Acceptance, Positive Reappraisal, Putting into Perspective, Positive Refocusing, Planning) and on the relationships between these strategies and symptoms of depression. Although remarkable differences were found in reported strategies, relationships between cognitive emotion regulation strategies and symptoms of depression were shown to be similar between the five groups.
Driving is a challenging task because of the physical, attentional, and emotional demands. When drivers become frustrated by events their negative emotional state can escalate dangerously. This study examines behavioral and attitudinal effects of cognitively reframing frustrating events. Participants (N = 36) were asked to navigate a challenging driving course that included frustrating events such as long lights and being cut-off. Drivers were randomly assigned to three conditions. After encountering a frustrating event, drivers in a reappraisal-down condition heard voice prompts that reappraised the event in an effort to deflate negative reactions. Drivers in the second group, reappraisal-up, heard voice prompts that brought attention to the negative actions of vehicles and pedestrians. Drivers in a silent condition drove without hearing any voice prompts. Participants in the reappraisal-down condition had better driving behavior and reported less negative emotions than participants in the other conditions.
Distraction and reappraisal are two widely used forms of emotion regulation. The process model of emotion regulation (Gross, 1998) holds that they differ (1) in when they act on the emotion-generative process, and (2) in their impact on subsequent responses to regulated stimuli. We tested these two predictions by measuring electrocortical responses to neutral and emotional images during two phases. In the regulation phase, images were watched or regulated using distraction or reappraisal. During the re-exposure phase, the same images were passively watched. As predicted, during regulation, distraction reduced the late positive potential (LPP) earlier than reappraisal. Upon re-exposure, images with a distraction (but not reappraisal) history elicited a larger LPP than images with an attend history. This pattern of results suggests that distraction and reappraisal intervene at separate stages during emotion generation, a feature which may have distinct consequences that extend beyond the regulatory episode.
Depression is a disorder of impaired emotion regulation. Consequently, examining individual differences in the habitual use of emotion regulation strategies has considerable potential to inform models of this debilitating disorder. The aim of the current study was to identify cognitive processes that may be associated with the use of emotion regulation strategies and to elucidate their relation to depression. Depression has been found to be associated with difficulties in cognitive control and, more specifically, with difficulties inhibiting the processing of negative material. We used a negative affective priming task to assess the relations among inhibition and individual differences in the habitual use of rumination, reappraisal, and expressive suppression in clinically depressed, formerly depressed, and never-depressed participants. We found that depressed participants exhibited the predicted lack of inhibition when processing negative material. Moreover, within the group of depressed participants, reduced inhibition of negative material was associated with greater rumination. Across the entire sample, reduced inhibition of negative material was related to less use of reappraisal and more use of expressive suppression. Finally, within the formerly depressed group, less use of reappraisal, more use of rumination, and greater expressive suppression were related to higher levels of depressive symptoms. These findings suggest that individual differences in the use of emotion regulation strategies play an important role in depression, and that deficits in cognitive control are related to the use of maladaptive emotion regulation strategies in this disorder.
60 undergraduates, selected on the basis of scores on the Trait form of the State-Trait Anger Scale, participated in cognitive and relaxation coping skill interventions for anger reduction or in a no-treatment control. Ss also completed measures such as the State form of the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory and the Beck Depression Inventory. By 4-wk follow-up, cognitive and relaxation groups reported significantly less general anger, physical symptoms of anger, daily ratings of anger, and less state anger and tendency to cope with verbal antagonism in response to imaginal provocations than did controls and did not differ from one another. Constructive coping in the imaginal provocations and trait anxiety showed the cognitive condition improved relative to the control, whereas the relaxation group did not differ significantly from other groups. No between-groups differences were found for personal anger situations, depression, or heart rate and coping via physical antagonism in response to provocations. One-year follow-up revealed maintenance of patterns for general anger and anxiety reduction. Results are discussed in terms of the value of applied relaxation for anger reduction. (12 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)