Emotion regulation in context: Examining the spontaneous use of strategies across emotional intensity and type of emotion

• Emotion intensity and emotion type play a role in spontaneous emotion regulation.
• Higher emotion intensity was associated with greater emotion regulation efforts.
• Expressive suppression was used more in response to high intensity sadness than anger.

Emerging research suggests that two features of emotional contexts (emotion intensity, emotion type) predict spontaneous use of emotion regulation (ER) strategies. However, prior work has not examined the interactive effects of emotion intensity and emotion type on the selection of specific ER strategies. This is a noteworthy omission because in real life, emotional situations are characterized by a combination of emotion intensity and type. We recruited 562 participants and asked them to report their use of 7 ER strategies across self-identified stressful contexts that varied in emotion intensity (moderate, high) and primary emotion elicited (anger, anxiety, sadness). Participants reported using ER strategies to a greater extent in high versus moderate emotionally intense contexts, and in response to sadness (versus anger). Further, high intensity sadness prompted greater use of expressive suppression than other contexts. Our findings underscore the importance of taking into account emotional contextual features as predictors of spontaneous ER.