State gender variability and body satisfaction among sexual minority men.

Prominent theories of gender suggest that gender can be variable, rather than static. For example, a person may experience changes in their masculinity and femininity in daily life, which we refer to as 'state gender variability.' Theory and research suggest that the degree to which masculinity and femininity fluctuate may have implications for body satisfaction.

Motivational Intensity in Emotion Regulation.

Changing how we feel can be adaptive, but it is also difficult and may require effort. There is research on what people want to achieve in emotion regulation (motivational content), but there is little research on how intensely people pursue what they want to achieve (motivational intensity). We tested the role of motivational intensity in emotion regulation, by assessing (Studies 1-2, s = 160 and 157) and manipulating (Study 3, = 250) it in daily life.

Uncertainty moderates the emotional consequences of reappraisal, social sharing, and rumination in daily life.

People must often wait for important but uncertain outcomes, like medical results or job offers. During such , there is uncertainty around an outcome that people have minimal control over. Uncertainty makes these periods emotionally challenging, raising the possibility that emotion regulation strategies may have different effects while people wait for an uncertain outcome versus after they learn that outcome.

The Double-Edged Sword of Social Sharing: Social Sharing Predicts Increased Emotion Differentiation When Rumination Is Low but Decreased Emotion Differentiation When Rumination Is High.

Laypeople believe that sharing their emotional experiences with others will improve their understanding of those experiences, but no clear empirical evidence supports this belief. To address this gap, we used data from four daily life studies ( = 659; student and community samples) to explore the association between social sharing and subsequent emotion differentiation, which involves labeling emotions with a high degree of complexity. Contrary to our expectations, we found that social sharing of emotional experiences was linked to greater subsequent emotion differentiation on occasions when people ruminated less than usual about these experiences.

Stuck with the foot on the pedal: Depression and motivated emotion regulation in daily life.

According to cybernetic approaches, emotion regulation is motivated by the desire to reduce discrepancies between experienced and desired emotions. Yet, this assumption has rarely been tested directly in healthy or unhealthy populations. In two ecological momentary assessment studies, we monitored motivated emotion regulation in daily life in participants who varied in the severity of their depressive symptoms (Study 1; = 173) and in clinically depressed and nondepressed participants (Study 2; = 120).

Secrecy in Everyday Life.

Secrecy is common, yet we know little about how it plays out in daily life. Most existing research on secrecy is based on methods involving retrospection over long periods of time, failing to capture secrecy "in the wild." Filling this gap, we conducted two studies using intensive longitudinal designs to present the first picture of secrecy in everyday life.

On liking how you look and feeling sexy: Quantifying the overlap between sexual desirability and body satisfaction in a sample of Australian Grindr users.

The body image field aims to cultivate positive body image. To do so, it must appreciate factors contributing to positive body image. Sexual desirability is one such factor.

Mapping Interpersonal Emotion Regulation in Everyday Life.

Unlabelled: The growing literature on interpersonal emotion regulation has largely focused on the strategies people use to regulate. As such, researchers have little understanding of how often people regulate in the first place, what emotion regulation goals they have when they regulate, and how much effort they invest in regulation. To better characterize features of the regulation process, we conducted two studies using daily diary ( = 171) and experience sampling methods ( = 239), exploring interpersonal emotion regulation in the context of everyday social interactions.

Flexibility or instability? Emotion goal dynamics and mental health.

Emotion goals (i.e., what people want or do not want to feel) have important implications for emotional and mental health because they can shape whether, when, and how people regulate their emotions.

Assessing Validity and Bias of Within-Person Variability in Affect and Personality.

Within-person variability in affect (e.g., Neuroticism) and personality have been linked to well-being.

Does interpersonal emotion regulation effort pay off?

Interpersonal emotion regulation shapes people's emotional and relational experiences. Yet, researchers know little about the regulation processes that influence these outcomes. Recent works in the intrapersonal emotion regulation space suggest that motivational strength, or , people invest in regulation might be the answer.

Emotion regulation strategy use in PTSD: A daily life study.

Background: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder is associated with emotion regulation difficulties. However, our understanding of these difficulties has been limited by the reliance of previous work on retrospective trait self-reports, which are unable to capture dynamic, ecologically-valid use of emotion regulation strategies.

Methods: To address this issue, this study used an ecological momentary assessment (EMA) design to understand the impact of PTSD on emotion regulation in daily life.

Everyday emotional functioning in COVID-19 lockdowns.

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, policy makers have tried to balance the effectiveness of lockdowns (i.e., stay-at-home orders) with their potential mental health costs.

Do emotion intensity, variability, differentiation, co-occurrence, and positive-negative ratios make unique contributions to predicting longitudinal change in psychological distress and well-being?

A burgeoning array of affective indices are proposed to capture features of affect that contribute to mental health and well-being. However, because indices are often investigated separately, it is unclear what-if any-unique role they have. The present study addresses this question in a high-stress naturalistic context by prospectively testing the relative contributions of eight affective indices to psychological outcomes during the first acute lockdown phase of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Social Support Predicts Differential Use, but not Differential Effectiveness, of Expressive Suppression and Social Sharing in Daily Life.

Unlabelled: While emotion regulation often happens in the presence of others, little is known about how social context shapes regulatory efforts and outcomes. One key element of the social context is social support. In two experience sampling studies (s = 179 and 123), we examined how the use and affective consequences of two fundamentally social emotion-regulation strategies-social sharing and expressive suppression-vary as a function of perceived social support.

Ready for the worst? Negative affect in anticipation of a stressor does not protect against affective reactivity.

Introduction: Lay wisdom suggests feeling negative while awaiting an upcoming stressor-anticipatory negative affect-shields against the blow of the subsequent stressor. However, evidence is mixed, with different lines of research and theory indirectly suggesting that anticipatory negative affect is helpful, harmful, or has no effect on emotional outcomes. In two studies, we aimed to reconcile these competing views by examining the affective trajectory across hours, days, and months, separating affective reactivity and recovery.

Some Recommendations on the Use of Daily Life Methods in Affective Science.

Real-world emotions are often more vivid, personally meaningful, and consequential than those evoked in the lab. Therefore, studying emotions in daily life is essential to test theories, discover new phenomena, and understand healthy emotional functioning; in short, to move affective science forward. The past decades have seen a surge of research using daily diary, experience sampling, or ecological momentary assessment methods to study emotional phenomena in daily life.

Emotion Appraisals and Coping with Secrets.

Secrecy is both common and consequential. Recent work suggests that personal experiences with secrets (i.e.

Emotion regulation in everyday life: Mapping global self-reports to daily processes.

Recent theory conceptualizes emotion regulation as occurring across three stages: (a) identifying the need to regulate, (b) selecting a strategy, and (c) implementing that strategy to modify emotions. Yet, measurement of emotion regulation has not kept pace with these theoretical advances. In particular, widely used global self-report questionnaires are often assumed to index people's typical strategy selection tendencies.

Emotion experience and expression goals shape emotion regulation strategy choice.

Research has begun to investigate how goals for emotion experience-how people want to feel-influence the selection of emotion regulation strategies to achieve these goals. We make the case that it is not only how people want to that affects strategy selection, but also how they want to be seen to feel. Incorporating this expressive dimension distinguishes four unique emotion goals: (1) to experience and express emotion; (2) to experience but not express emotion; (3) to express but not experience emotion; and (4) to neither experience nor express emotion.

Momentary Emotion Differentiation: The Derivation and Validation of an index to Study Within-Person Fluctuations in Emotion Differentiation.

Emotion differentiation refers to the tendency to label emotions in a granular way. While differentiation is an important individual difference in the context of psychological well-being, it is unknown how it fluctuates within individuals. Such a within-person measure is important, since it would allow the study of how changes in differentiation predict subsequent levels of other variables of interest.