Dealing with feeling: a meta-analysis of the effectiveness of strategies derived from the process model of emotion regulation.

By Thomas Llewelyn Webb, E. Miles, P. Sheeran. Psychological bulletin, 2012

1,834 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The present meta-analysis investigated the effectiveness of strategies derived from the process model of emotion regulation in modifying emotional outcomes as indexed by experiential, behavioral, and physiological measures. A systematic search of the literature identified 306 experimental comparisons of different emotion regulation (ER) strategies. ER instructions were coded according to a new taxonomy, and meta-analysis was used to evaluate the effectiveness of each strategy across studies. The findings revealed differences in effectiveness between ER processes: Attentional deployment had no effect on emotional outcomes (d(+) = 0.00), response modulation had a small effect (d(+) = 0.16), and cognitive change had a small-to-medium effect (d(+) = 0.36). There were also important within-process differences. We identified 7 types of attentional deployment, 4 types of cognitive change, and 4 types of response modulation, and these distinctions had a substantial influence on effectiveness. Whereas distraction was an effective way to regulate emotions (d(+) = 0.27), concentration was not (d(+) = -0.26). Similarly, suppressing the expression of emotion proved effective (d(+) = 0.32), but suppressing the experience of emotion or suppressing thoughts of the emotion-eliciting event did not (d(+) = -0.04 and -0.12, respectively). Finally, reappraising the emotional response proved less effective (d(+) = 0.23) than reappraising the emotional stimulus (d(+) = 0.36) or using perspective taking (d(+) = 0.45). The review also identified several moderators of strategy effectiveness including factors related to the (a) to-be-regulated emotion, (b) frequency of use and intended purpose of the ER strategy, (c) study design, and (d) study characteristics.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/192920a0404f90f973be19559b4f93893587eb05

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Citations in the corpus

Coping, Emotion Regulation and Psychopathology in Childhood and Adolescence: A Meta-Analysis and Narrative Review (2017, background): “Several reviews have examined the associations between coping and emotion regulation and symptoms of psychopathology in adults (e.g., Aldao et al., 2010; Nolen-Hoeksema, 2012; Webb et al., 2012).”
Teacher emotion regulation strategies in response to classroom misbehavior (2020, background): “Due to their intervention at different points in the emotion-generative process, these strategies result in different immediate and long-term affective consequences (Webb et al., 2012).”
Emotion regulation strategies and psychosocial well-being in adolescence (2016, neutral): “…the EmR literature showed that most studies focused their attention on adults (e.g. only 4 out of 190 experimental studies on CR and ES reviewed by Webb et al., 2012 involved participants younger than 18 years), or on children and 13–16-year-old adolescents (e.g. Gullone et al., 2010; Shields &…”
Emotion Regulation: Why Beliefs Matter (2018, background): “Much of the available literature on emotion regulation has examined specific intrinsic regulation strategies, focusing either on habitual strategy use (see Aldao et al., 2010 for meta-analysis) or labouratory strategy use (see Webb et al., 2012 for meta-analysis).”
Is Emotional Suppression Always Bad? A Matter of Flexibility and Gender Differences (2019, background): “In other words, it could be an impairment in an individual’s ability to choose from different emotion regulation strategies and use them flexibly to be associated with maladaptive outcomes, rather than the use of an emotion regulation strategies per se (e.g., emotional suppression; Webb et al. 2012)”
Emotional outcomes of regulation strategies used during personal music listening: A mobile experience sampling study (2014, background): “In contrast, the strategy of concentration was found to be ineffective, leading to undesired hedonic outcomes (Webb et al., 2012).”