Schedule of Events | Symposia

Emotion regulation generation: Creativity and depression predict strategy choice, diversity, and fluency

Poster Session D - Monday, March 31, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Lucas Bellaiche¹ (lucas.bellaiche@duke.edu), Leonard Faul², Kayla Lihardo¹, Catherine Flanagan¹, Kevin S. LaBar¹; ¹Duke University, ²Boston College

Individual patterns of emotion regulation (ER) are traditionally examined using methods like self-report questionnaires. These approaches, however, largely overlook the generative component underlying ER. That is, participants must generate specific ideas of a given strategy, and the fluency with which such ideas are generated could inform reliance on these strategies in the real-world. In this study, we instructed participants (N=144) to generate situation-specific ideas to manage their emotions in response to hypothetical negative scenarios. All ideas (n=8185) were then coded to one of 14 possible ER strategies. We also measured depressive symptoms and trait-level creativity (i.e., Alternative Uses Task originality scores). Results revealed that greater creativity predicted a higher diversity of strategies represented among the generated techniques (b = .15, p < .001) even when accounting for current mood and motivation levels. When modeling the specific number of ideas generated for each of the 14 coded strategies, higher creativity predicted a higher likelihood to attempt (p < .001) and subsequently generate more ideas (p = .01) for a wide range of strategies, most notably problem-solving, cognitive restructuring, and active distraction. Meanwhile, higher depressive symptoms were associated with more generated ideas for social support seeking (b = .47, p = .002), but a reduced likelihood to generate any ideas pertaining to cognitive restructuring (b = -.21, p < .001). In sum, we capture ER via a novel methodological lens that clarifies the crucial component of idea generation, a process which seems to correspond in part with creative-thinking ability.

Topic Area: EMOTION & SOCIAL: Emotion-cognition interactions