Emotional inertia is independently associated with cognitive emotion regulation strategies and sleep quality

Emotional inertia reflects the tendency for emotions to persist over time. Higher emotional inertia has consistently been associated with lower wellbeing. Yet, we know little about the mechanisms underlying this association. Prior work suggests that good quality sleep and the frequent use of adaptive cognitive emotion regulation (CER) strategies (e.g., positive reappraisal) reduce the persistence of negative affect (NA) over time. However, whether sleep and adaptive CER strategy use work in synergy to reduce NA inertia is unclear. We examined this question in a well-powered online experiment. Participants (N = 245) watched a series of emotionally negative, positive, and neutral film clips in a fixed order and rated how each clip made them feel on negative and positive affective states. Emotion ratings were collected again after a short rest period to determine the persistence of clip-induced affect. Standardised questionnaires were used to index participants’ sleep quality and tendency to engage in adaptive and maladaptive (e.g., rumination) CER strategies. Using an autoregressive modelling approach, we found that greater use of adaptive CER strategies and high sleep quality were both associated with lower NA inertia. Interestingly, the association between adaptive CER strategy use and NA inertia was observed irrespective of whether participants obtained high- or low-quality sleep. These findings suggest that sleep and adaptive CER strategies hold important but distinct roles in maintaining emotional wellbeing.