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Category: Project

Description: Emotion regulation studies often task trained participants with responding to unimodal stimuli in safe, stationary settings, which may limit generalizability to emotion regulation in typical or dynamic situations. Across three studies, we highlight discrepencies between the use and forecasting of emotion regulation strategies among untrained participants using dynamic, feature-rich settings and stimuli. * Study 01 did not find a relationship between how intense untrained participants reported emotional events were in a haunted house and which startegy they used to regulate those events, which contrasts with extant literature. This appears to be due to an overusage and underperformance of distraction. * Study 02 tasked participants who did not experience the haunted house with forecasting what they would have done in response to descriptions of the events and emotions associated with them. Study 02 participants did demonstrate an intensity-strategy relationship and overpredicted how often they would use distration, relative to what experiencers did in practice. * Study 03 measured emotion regulation from forecasters and experiencers in the same study while participants watched horror movie clips. Intensity did predict strategy usage and forecasting, but again, forecasters predicted that distraction would be more effective and used more often than experieners reported experiencing in practice. This pattern of results highlights divides in how we plan to and execute emotional regulation as well as challenges with generalizing the results of lab paradigms to more challenging idiosyncratic contexts.