Does Emotion Regulation Help Us Pursue Our Goals? Adaptive and Maladaptive Strategy Use and Everyday Goal Progress

Abstract

Research on personal everyday goals (e.g., make friends) has mainly focused on the effectiveness of self-control strategies for making progress.While one reason people experience self-control challenges (e.g., temptations, procrastination) is poorly managed mood, there is a lack of research examining how emotion regulation specifically impacts the progress of everyday goals.Using a longitudinal experience sampling method and daily diary design, 317 participants reported their emotion regulation across 14 different strategies and goal progress over a sevenday period, then at one and three-month follow-ups.A greater use of adaptive emotion regulation strategies positively predicted nightly (between persons) and follow-up goal progress, while a greater use of maladaptive strategies did not.The effectiveness of a strategy generally did not depend on the intensity of negative emotions.Out of 14 strategies, reflection was found to have the largest positive impact, highlighting a particularly effective approach to emotions that facilitates goals.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 1 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.