Coping with sadness : How personality and emotion regulation strategies differentially predict the experience of induced emotions

Abstract

Dealing with negative emotions is a challenge of everyday life. Personality, specifically neuroticism, predicts how susceptible we are to experiencing negative emotions, whereas negative emotions can, in turn, bias self-rated personality. Emotion regulation research has shown how people effectively regulate when experiencing negative emotions. In this experiment, we examined if personality and emotion regulation strategies predict redundant or different aspects of dealing with sadness, and how sadness affects self-rated personality.Toward this aim, 82 participants were measured twice with a lag of one month. Self-rated personality and emotion regulation strategies were assessed in the neutral and sad emotional state. Results showed a bi-directional relationship: Sadness led to decreased extraversion and elevated neuroticism scores, whereas neuroticism predicted the susceptibility to sadness. Conversely, emotion regulation strategies did not correlate with susceptibility to sadness, but expressive emotional suppression was linked to a slower remission.In line with a more dynamic view of personality, a bi-directional relationship between sadness and neuroticism could be validated, whereas remission of sadness was linked to emotion regulation strategies. Effective emotion regulation strategies, which are alterable by psychotherapeutic approaches, might be of special interest for people with high neuroticism scores who often experience negative emotions.