Project 466923

Anxiety is related to the ability for emotion regulation (ER) - the process where people modify the experience (intensity, duration, course) and expression of emotions. Further information for successful ER is key for understanding how to manage symptoms of anxiety, which is important for mental wellness. The current ER literature primarily has contrasted single strategies to assess individual effectiveness, leaving a gap in the literature, since people commonly use more than one strategy during a regulation instance - emotion polyregulation. Individual differences that predict who exactly is more likely to engage in emotion polyregulation have also not been sufficiently explored. This study will investigate emotion mindset (fixed versus growth) as a predictor of the use and success of emotion polyregulation of state anxiety in young adults. Using a diverse sample from Canadian universities, I will use the Implicit Theories of Emotion Scale to determine growth or fixed emotion mindset. State anxiety, ER strategies (e.g. distraction), and their success will be measured using experience sampling to capture ER in daily life through a smartphone app (6 prompts daily for 2 weeks for a 1-minute survey). I will use multilevel modeling for data analysis. I hypothesize that people with a growth emotion mindset will 1) show higher emotion polyregulation, 2) report using more successful strategies to regulate state anxiety, and 3) be more successful overall in regulating state anxiety. An emotion polyregulation approach may be a better representation of daily ER. Thus, examining emotion polyregulation and emotion mindset will provide valuable information for enhancing the effectiveness of interventions and psychoeducation. Successful ER is an effortful process requiring knowledge.