| Popis: |
Research suggests affective symptoms are associated with habitual use of maladaptive emotion regulation strategies in individuals with mental health problems. Less is known, however, about whether mental health problems are related to reduced emotion regulation capacity per se. The current study investigates this question using a film-based emotion regulation task that required participants to downregulate their emotional response to highly evocative real-life film footage. We pooled data (N= 512, age: 18-89 years, 54% female) from 6 independent studies using this task. In contrast to our predictions, we found no support that symptoms of depression and anxiety were related to emotion regulation capacity or to emotional reactivity to negative films. These findings raise the possibility that the experience of mental health problems may not be associated with reduced emotion regulation capacity when measured using a regulation task. Implications for the measurement of emotion regulation as well as future directions for research in the field of emotion regulation are discussed. |
