Regulating others' emotions: An exploratory study of everyday extrinsic emotion regulation in university students

Emotion regulation predicts important life outcomes including psychopathology, social outcomes, work performance, and academic achievement. Extrinsic emotion regulation strategies (the strategies used to influence others' emotions) are under-studied relative to intrinsic regulation strategies (the strategies used to regulate one's own emotions). In the current study, we used experience sampling to examine participants' extrinsic emotion regulation strategies. Participants (165 university students) reported the strategies they used to regulate others' emotions on 30 occasions over 5 days. The findings suggest that participants frequently report regulating others' emotions and report using receptive listening and reframing more than humor and distraction. Empathy, conscientiousness and agreeableness were associated with differences in the use of extrinsic emotion regulation strategies. These findings help characterize everyday extrinsic emotion regulation strategies and how these strategies relate to other individual differences.