Emotion control during later life: The relationship between global perceptions and daily experience

The extent to which individuals generally believe that they can successfully manage their emotions is related to healthy coping and well-being. Nevertheless, it is unclear how this general belief is related to daily affective experiences. In the current study, the relationship between global emotion control beliefs and daily affect reports across 56 days were assessed in a sample of 298 older adults. Results indicate that higher global emotion control beliefs were related to lower mean daily negative affect and higher mean daily positive affect. Additionally, variability analyses investigating multiple potential time scales revealed that global beliefs were related to lower variance in daily negative affect and less variable speeds of daily negative affect change across a range of time scales (from windows of 3 days to windows of approximately 2 weeks). Alternatively, global control beliefs were not significantly related to variance in daily positive affect or variance in speeds of daily positive affect change. Together, results suggest that global emotion control beliefs predict average experience of daily affect and variability in daily negative affect.