Regulating Emotion Systems in Everyday Life

Researchers are increasingly using ecological momentary assessment (EMA) to investigate how people regulate their emotions from moment-to-moment in daily life. However, existing self-report measures of emotion regulation have been designed and validated to assess habitual/trait use of emotion regulation strategies and may therefore not be suited to assessing momentary emotion regulation. The present study aimed to develop a brief, yet reliable, EMA measure of emotion regulation in daily life by adapting the Regulation of Emotion Systems Survey (RESS; DeFrance & Hollenstein, 2017), a recently developed global self-report questionnaire assessing habitual use of six emotion regulation strategies. We created an EMA version of the RESS by selecting 12 items from the original scale and adapting them for EMA. We investigated the psychometric properties of the new RESS-EMA scale by administering it eight times daily for 7 days via smartphones to a sample of undergraduates (n = 112). Results of multilevel modeling analyses supported the within- and between-person reliability and validity of the RESS-EMA scale and suggest that it is a viable way to comprehensively assess momentary emotion regulation strategy use in daily life.