Context factors that influence emotion regulation use and effectiveness
Method Stream: Literature Review
ECs: Both 14 and 23 EC thesis possible
Description:
How people regulate negative emotions or cope with stressful situations in their daily life has effects on their mental health. Whether someone actively tries to eliminate a stressor, keeps ruminating about it, talks about it to others or distracts themselves by engaging in physical exercise has an effect on the stress-related processes and hence their vulnerability to develop mental illness. Experience sampling methodology (ESM) can be used to examine these regulatory strategies in an individual’s daily life. However, a single strategy is not always adaptive or maladaptive: it depends on personal (e.g., gender, age, psychopathology) and context (e.g., social situation, location, current activity) variables which strategy is used and which strategy is effective. To date, there is no clear overview of which person and context variables are important for the use and effectiveness of strategies.
In this assignment, you will carry out a literature review on the daily-life context factors, as well as person-level variables that have been investigated in relation to the use and effectiveness of daily-life coping and emotion regulation strategies. This way, you will create an overview of the context variables that have an influence on selection and effects of these strategies, which provides important information for our understanding of these mechanisms and inform directions for precision medicine.