The Winner Takes It All? Self-control as a Predictor for Adaptive Emotion Regulation Strategies

Abstract

High self-controllers have been suggested to be good at regulating emotions, yet how they regulate their emotions has hardly been examined. This research examined whether high (vs. low) self-controllers had a stronger tendency to use adaptive emotion regulation strategies, especially when they aimed to minimize the negative emotional experience. Three online studies examined two adaptive emotion regulation strategies, reappraisal (Study 1a and 1b) and attention deployment (Study 2), and one maladaptive strategy: suppression (Study 1a and 1b). All studies manipulated the goal of experiencing as few negative emotions as possible with two conditions (goal salient and no-goal). Study 1a (n = 84) and 1b (n = 162) asked participants to choose either reappraisal, suppression or watching to regulate their feelings when observing emotional pictures. Both studies found that presenting an emotion regulation goal (vs. no goal) encouraged usage of reappraisal, yet self-control and its interaction with condition did not have a significant effect on reappraisal. Study1b found that high self-control predicted less usage of suppression. Study 2 (n = 119) measured attention bias towards positive stimuli and attention bias away from negative stimuli via a dot probe task. No significant effects were found. Together, these studies found that self control did not predict the usage of adaptive emotion regulation strategies. The findings are discussed in light of the potential contributions to the literature, limitations, and recommendations for future research.