Emotion regulation in the context of daily stress: Impact on daily affect

- A daily diary study tested the impact of emotion regulation and stress on affect.
- Suppression negatively impacts positive affect during high but not low stress.
- It is important to consider emotion regulation in the context of stressful events.

A daily diary study was used to examine how person-level emotion regulation (i.e., reappraisal and suppression) impacts daily affect following stressful daily life events. Research has highlighted the positive and negative impacts of reappraisal and suppression on daily affect, respectively, but has yet to investigate emotion regulation in light of daily stress. After completing a measure of emotion regulation, participants completed measures of daily stress and daily affect at the end of each day for one week. As hypothesized, multilevel modeling results indicated that as daily stress increased, individuals were more likely to report lower positive and higher negative affect. Consistent with prior research, reappraisal was associated with better affect. Suppression was associated with lower positive affect. The main finding of this study was a significant cross-level interaction of daily stress and suppression on daily positive affect where individuals high in suppression experienced lower positive affect on days of high stress than days of low stress. This suggests that suppression may not be detrimental in low stress situations when emotion regulation is less important, but negatively impacts positive affect during high stress. These results point to the importance of considering emotion regulation in the context of stressful life events.