532 v. AFFECTI vE PROCESSES
Kuppens, 2017). Individuals are much more 
likely to regulate for pro-  hedonic reasons 
and they use a wide range of strategies to 
do so (Brans, Koval, Verduyn, Lim, & Kup -
pens, 2013; Nezlek & Kuppens, 2008). 
Future research should continue the use of 
daily methods and capitalize on the unique 
advantage of being able to capture impor -
tant situational variance (English & Elde -
souky, 2020). Contextual information can 
help researchers determine the conditions 
under which individuals might regulate for 
certain reasons or use certain strategies, as 
well as when strategies are most functional. 
For instance, individuals regulate their emo -
tions more in social contexts than when they 
are alone (Heiy & Cheavens, 2014), and 
they use antecedent-  focused strategies, such 
as distraction and reappraisal more on days 
when they regulate for prohedonic reasons 
(English et al., 2017). Reappraisal has also 
been found to be more beneficial for emo -
tional well-being in controllable situations 
than in uncontrollable situations (Haines 
et al., 2016). Naturalistic and experimental 
methods are both needed to fully under -
stand how emotion regulation patterns fluc -
tuate based on contextual factors, and how 
these factors impact regulation outcomes. 
For example, would activating a prohedonic 
goal in a laboratory setting increase one’s re -
appraisal use, or would using reappraisal in 
an uncontrollable situation elicit more nega -
tive emotion than using it in a controllable 
situation?
Behavioral measures could be combined 
with daily methods to better understand 
the cues associated with emotion regulation 
and the contexts in which people use emo -
tion regulation. For instance, future studies 
could gather video recordings of participants 
while they regulate their emotions in the 
laboratory (Levenson & Gottman, 1983), 
or use more flexible recording tools such as 
the electronically activated recorder (EAR; 
Mehl, Pennebaker, Crow, Dabbs, & Price, 
2001) and wearable cameras (Brown, Blake, 
& Sherman, 2017) to capture regulation in 
daily life. Behavioral tasks could also be 
leveraged as another way of assessing emo -
tion regulation. For instance, in prior work, 
situation selection has been measured by 
tracking how individuals navigate viewing 
of emotional stimuli (Sands & Isaacowitz, 2017). Other instances can be seen in work 
on emotion regulation ability, as measured 
via neural responding when using reapprais -
al while viewing neutral and negative im -
ages (Davis et al., 2014), as well as emotion 
regulation flexibility, measured by having 
outside observers code for emotional expres -
sions when participants were instructed to 
express or suppress their emotions (Bonan -
no et al., 2004).
Stability and  Change in  Emotion 
Regulation  Patterns
A second area of work on emotion regula -
tion concerns stability and change. There 
are at least three important directions in 
this area: testing whether patterns of emo -
tion regulation are trait-like, or relatively en -
during over time and consistent across con -
texts; examining development or long-term 
change; and exploring variability or short-
term fluctuations.
Traits are patterns of thought, feeling, 
or behavior that are generally consistent 
over time and across situations (McCrae & 
Costa, 1994). There is some evidence of the 
trait-like nature of certain aspects of emo -
tion regulation. For instance, past work has 
documented the temporal stability for self- 
reports of emotional intelligence (Brackett 
& Mayer, 2003) and emotional preferences 
(Tsai et al., 2006). Similarly, in terms of 
emotion regulation strategy use, self-  reports 
of habitual use of suppression and reapprais -
al show reasonable test–  retest reliability, at 
least across 3 months (Gross & John, 2003). 
However, there is still much to be learned 
about stability of emotion regulation tenden -
cies, including the frequency and success of 
emotion regulation in general and using spe -
cific tactics. Another useful approach may 
be directly comparing trait and daily mea -
sures of emotion regulation. A recent experi -
ence sampling study found only a weak link 
between trait-level and daily strategy use for 
mindfulness, reappraisal, and suppression 
(Brockman, Ciarrochi, Parker, & Kashdan, 
2017). It is possible that certain aspects of 
emotion regulation may be more trait-like 
than others and thus, more consistent across 
contexts. It is also possible that trait and 
daily measures are somewhat capturing dif -
ferent outcomes (Finnigan & Vazire, 2018), 