Running head: EI AND ER VARIABILITY 1

Emotionally intelligent people show more flexible regulation of emotions in daily life

Kit S. Double1

Rebecca T. Pinkus1

Carolyn MacCann1

1
School of Psychology, The University of Sydney

Emotion

© 2021, American Psychological Association. This paper is not the copy of record and may not exactly
replicate the final, authoritative version of the article. Please do not copy or cite without authors' permission.
The final article will be available, upon publication, via its DOI: 10.1037/emo0001069 Author Note

This research was funded by an Australian Research Council grant (DP210103484)

Author Correspondence

Kit Double

University of Sydney

Kit.double@sydney.edu.au
EI AND ER VARIABILITY 2

Abstract

Emotion regulation strategies have been characterized as adaptive or maladaptive; however, the
ability to switch strategies to best suit the situation (regulatory flexibility and adaptability)
underlies effective emotion regulation. Emotional intelligence may be a key capacity that enables
flexible emotion regulation. We use experience sampling data from 165 participants to test
whether emotional intelligence abilities (emotion understanding and management) predict
variability in four emotion regulation strategies. Results show that both the emotion
understanding and emotion management branches of emotional intelligence significantly relate
to between-strategy variability (with moderate effect sizes), but only emotion understanding
significantly predicts within-strategy variability. These findings support the hypothesis that
emotional intelligence is an important predictor of the ability to flexibly vary emotion regulation
depending on the situation.

Keywords: emotion regulation, emotional intelligence, flexibility, individual differences, within-

person variability
EI AND ER VARIABILITY 3

Emotionally intelligent people show more flexible regulation of emotions in daily life

Emotion regulation strategies are processes individuals use to modulate the magnitude or

type of emotion they are feeling (Aldao et al., 2015). Some emotion regulation strategies are

more effective than others on average (Gross & John, 2003); leading to some strategies being

characterized as universally adaptive (e.g., positive reappraisal—reinterpreting events to alter

their emotional impact) and some as universally maladaptive (e.g., expressive suppression).

However, effective regulation requires more than simply learning what strategies ‘work’ and

repeating them ad nauseam; instead, effective emotion regulation requires one to regulate their

emotion in a flexible and dynamic fashion (Aldao et al., 2015; Bonanno & Burton, 2013).

Effective emotion regulation may require regulatory flexibility—flexible use of different

strategies that best suit the situation. Regulatory flexibility is crucial for psychological wellbeing

and mental health (Aldao et al., 2015; Bonanno & Burton, 2013; Kashdan & Rottenberg, 2010;

Westphal et al., 2010). Little is known, however, about which personal characteristics enable

flexible emotion regulation. Given the theoretical links between emotional intelligence (EI) and

targeted use of regulation strategies to fit the situation, we test whether EI is associated with

regulatory flexibility.

Regulatory flexibility involves varying your regulation strategies, which requires both

context sensitivity and a large repertoire of available strategies to draw on (Bonanno & Burton,

2013). Regulatory flexibility may also involve meta-cognitive skill—the ability to monitor and

evaluate feedback on strategy effectiveness across situations, and adjust accordingly (Bonanno &

Burton, 2013). Computationally, regulatory flexibility is measured as the within-person

variability in emotion regulation strategies across time and across strategies (Aldao et al., 2015;

Blanke et al., 2020). While regulation variability and regulatory flexibility are not synonymous
EI AND ER VARIABILITY 4

(variability is necessary but not sufficient for flexibility), Aldao et al. (2015) argue that

variability is a reasonable and easier-to-measure proxy for regulatory flexibility. Regulation

variability can be decomposed into within-strategy variability (variability of each strategy across

occasions, aggregated across strategies), and between-strategy variability (variability between

strategies on a given occasion, aggregated across occasions).

Experience sampling methodology (ESM) studies have found that both higher within-

strategy variability and between-strategy variability relates to lower negative affect (Blanke et

al., 2020) and within-strategy variability relates to lower psychopathology and higher adjustment

(Aldao & Nolen-Hoeksema, 2012; Bonanno et al., 2004; Fresco et al., 2006). Although these

studies highlight the importance of regulatory flexibility for emotional outcomes, there has been

little research on the predictors of regulatory flexibility—the characteristics enabling people to

flexibly select and use different regulation strategies.

Emotional Intelligence

EI can be assessed as an ability (Mestre et al., 2016) or as a set of personality traits,

typically self-rated (Walker et al., 2021). Ability EI is measured with objective tasks that require

knowledge and processing of emotional information. We use the four-branch ability definition of

EI, where the four branches are perception (perceiving emotions in external stimuli such as

others’ facial expressions or body language), facilitation (using emotions to facilitate task

performance), understanding (understanding how emotions combine and change over time) and

management (managing emotions to align with personal goals; (Mayer et al., 2016; Mayer &

Salovey, 1995).

Peña-Sarrionandia et al.’s review (2015) found that emotionally intelligent people use

more adaptive strategies (situational modification, positive reappraisal, and distraction) but less
EI AND ER VARIABILITY 5

maladaptive strategies (rumination). They proposed that people with high EI should have more

regulation strategies at their disposal and use them more flexibly. However, this claim has not yet

been tested. We propose that two key branches of emotional intelligence—emotion

understanding and management—should relate to regulatory flexibility.

Emotion understanding involves knowledge of changes over time and context:

understanding transitions among emotions, the causes and consequences of emotions, including

the situation cues that elicit emotions, and the way one would feel if certain events or situations

took place (Mayer et al., 2016). This sensitivity to context cues and to changes over time

suggests that emotion understanding is involved in regulatory flexibility.

Emotion management involves knowledge of the relative effectiveness of different

regulation tactics in a specific situation—assessments explicitly ask test-takers to evaluate the

effectiveness of different regulatory responses in a specific situation. Thus, emotion management

should be linked to between-strategy variability, which involves the selective use of different

strategies in each situation. Moreover, emotion management involves meta-cognitive elements,

including evaluating and monitoring regulation strategies, and attending to emotions as a source

of feedback for regulation effectiveness (Mayer et al., 2016). This is almost identical to Bonanno

and Burton’s (2013) ‘sensitivity to feedback’ requirement for regulatory flexibility. As such,

emotion management ability may relate to regulatory flexibility.

We therefore hypothesize that regulatory flexibility (both within-strategy and between-

strategy variability) should be related to emotion understanding (Hypothesis 1) and emotion

management (Hypothesis 2).

EI AND ER VARIABILITY 6

Method

Participants

The study received ethical approval from the University of Sydney (protocol number

2018/528). Participants were 175 undergraduate psychology students (74% female, Mage = 20.49

years, SD = 3.38) at a large public university. Participants received course credit in exchange for

participation. The sample size was planned to have 80% power to detect a small-to-moderate

effect (rho = .2) for a two-tailed correlation. A G*Power analysis suggested a sample of size of

193 participants. We aimed to recruit a sample size as close to this value as possible within

practical constraints. 10 participants were excluded from analyses for: a) failing all attention

check questions (n = 6), b) completing the baseline protocol in less than 1/3 of the median time

(n = 1), c) completing the ESM protocol in a duration corresponding to less than 1 second per

item (n = 1), or d) voluntarily withdrawing from the study (n = 1). Prior to removing these 10

participants, ESM occasions were excluded if: a) response time was less than a third of the

median (occasions = 40); b) there was non-floor zero-variability across 2 or more sections of an

ESM occasion (occasions = 7); or c) less than 50% of the items were completed (occasions =

16). This left a final sample of 3,926 moments from 165 participants.

Transparency and openness

We report how we determined our sample size, all data exclusions, all manipulations, and

all measures in the study relevant to the current research questions (the data was collected as part

of a larger study, with the full set of measures described on OSF). All data, analysis code, and

research materials are available at (https://osf.io/pb7rw/?

view_only=1c230311e6b24ef6aca3ec5ad43f9221). This study was not preregistered.

EI AND ER VARIABILITY 7

Materials

Emotion Understanding: Emotion understanding was assessed using the 19-item brief

version of the Situational Test of Emotion Understanding (STEU; MacCann & Roberts, 2008).

The STEU asks participants to choose the emotion that a hypothetical subject is likely to feel in a

brief vignette. Items are scored based on expert consensus using partial scoring, with scoring

weights determined by the proportion of experts who select each option as the best answer.

Emotion Management: The 18-item Situational Test of Emotion Management - Brief

(STEM-B; Allen et al., 2015) assessed emotion management. The STEM-B presents participants

with brief vignettes detailing an emotional situation and they are told to choose the most

effective response to the situation. Items are scored based on expert consensus using partial

scoring, with scoring weights determined by the proportion of experts who select each option as

the best answer.

Emotion Regulation (ESM questions): Four regulation strategies were assessed, using

items from Bucich and MacCann (2019) to assess: 1) direct situation modification (“changed

something in your environment?”, “taken steps to change the situation you were in?”), 2)

distraction (“engaged in activities to distract yourself from your feelings?”, “diverted your

attention away from your feelings?”), 3) rumination (“ruminated or dwelled on your emotions or

what caused them”, “been unable to stop thinking about your feelings?”), and 4) reappraisal

(“looked at things from a different perspective?”, “changed the way you were thinking about

what caused your feelings?”). The question stem was “In the last two hours, how much have

you…” and participants rated their agreement on a 6-point scale from 1 (not at all) to 6 (very

much).
EI AND ER VARIABILITY 8

Procedure

Participants completed background measures of demographics in the laboratory before

commencing the ESM component of the study in which they reported their emotion regulation

strategies in everyday life. The ESM component involved participants responding to six mini-

surveys sent to their smartphone each day for five days (30 occasions per/participant).

Participants completed the mini-surveys on Qualtrics and were informed that they needed to

complete at least 75% to receive course credit. On each occasion, participants completed the

measure of emotion regulation strategies as well as a broader set of measures not reported here1.

Variability Metrics

Variability and average responding in participants’ everyday emotion regulation strategies

was assessed using the metrics proposed by Blanke et al. (2020) and described below. We focus

on both between-person and within-person variability. There are various metrics of variation that

can be used, but recent evidence suggests that both within-and between-person variability in

emotion regulation strategies accounts for significant variability in affect, with between-person

variability accounting for the larger portion of variance (Wenzel et al., 2021). There were three

variability metrics, with each having a corresponding metric of mean responding.

Person-level metrics of within-strategy and between-strategy variation were calculated to

indicate the variability in participants’ endorsement in the emotion regulation strategies.

The average endorsement provided to one strategy across measurement occasions t for

each individual participant i, was calculated as:

Ni
1
M (within ) i= ∑ x ti
N i t=1
1

The data come from a larger longitudinal study of emotion regulation that included questions about
extrinsic emotion regulation (regulating other people’s emotions).
EI AND ER VARIABILITY 9

The within-strategy SD for each strategy s for participant i was then calculated as:

Ni

SD(within ) si =
√ 1
∑ (x −M i)2
N i−1 t=1 ti

Finally, the within-strategy person index was calculated for each participant by

averaging across each of the s strategies.

4
1
M SD ( within) i= ∑ SD(within ) si
4 s=1

While within-strategy variance could only be calculated at the person-level, a between-

strategy variability index was calculated for each occasion and each person. First the mean

between-strategy endorsement was calculated for each participant i, by taking the average

endorsement of each strategy s for each occasion t.

4
1
M (between ) ti = ∑x
4 s=1 si

The between-strategy occasion index was then calculated as:

s=4
SD (between ) ti =
√ 1
∑ ( x −M (between ) ti )2
3 s=1 sti

This was then averaged across occasions to produce a between-strategy person index:
Ni
1
M SD ( between )i = ∑ SD( between )ti
N i t =1

Results

The relationship between EI and regulatory flexibility was calculated in three ways: 1)

person-level correlations of the two EI variables (understanding and managing emotions) with

within-strategy and between strategy variability; 2) person-level regression models predicting

between-strategy and within-strategy variability from either understanding or managing

emotions, controlling for the mean level of strategy endorsement; and 3) occasion-level
EI AND ER VARIABILITY 10

regressions for between-strategy variability only, where multilevel models nest occasions within

persons to test the relationship between EI and occasion-level between-strategy variability,

controlling for mean levels of strategy use on each occasion. The critical alpha value was set

at .05 for all analyses.

Person-level Correlations

Bivariate correlations are shown in Table 1 and Figure 1. Emotion understanding was

significantly related to both between-strategy variability (r = .30, p < .001) and within-strategy

variability (r = .16, p = .043), supporting Hypothesis 1. Emotion management was significantly

related to between-strategy variability (r = .24, p = .002) but not within-strategy variability (r

= .08, p = .330), providing partial support for Hypothesis 2.

Person-level Regressions

Person-level regressions controlling for mean strategy endorsement are shown in Table 2.

Controlling for mean strategy endorsement did not change the results. Emotion understanding

significantly predicted both between-strategy variability (β = .36, p < .001) and within-strategy

variability (β = .20, p = .005), supporting Hypothesis 1. Emotion management significantly

predicted between-strategy variability (β = .23, p < .001) but not within-strategy variability (β

= .07, p = .349), providing partial support for Hypothesis 2.

Multilevel Models

Table 2 shows occasion-level regressions testing the relationship between EI and

between-strategy variability while controlling for mean strategy endorsement (this analysis

cannot be performed for within-strategy variability as responses do not vary at the occasion

level). Occasions were nested within participants (i.e., a model with random intercepts for each

participant was performed). Both emotion management (β = .15, p = .001) and emotion
EI AND ER VARIABILITY 11

understanding (β = .22, p < .001) were significant positive predictors of the between-strategy

variability at the moment-level, supporting Hypotheses 1 and 22.

Taken together results suggest that emotion understanding is a robust predictor of

regulatory flexibility, supporting Hypothesis 1. Emotion management signficantly predicts

between-stategy variability, but not within-stategy variability, partially supporting Hypothesis 2.

Discussion

Our findings are the first to empirically demonstrate that EI predicts more varied use of

emotion regulation strategies. There are several possible reasons for this—emotionally intelligent

people have access to a broader range of emotion regulation strategies (Matthews & Zeidner,

2000), are more sensitive to emotional cues (Fernández-Abascal & Martín-Díaz, 2019), and are

more responsive to feedback (Sheldon et al., 2014). Our findings suggest that in real-world

contexts, emotionally-intelligent people vary which emotion regulation strategies they use (i.e.,

between-strategy variability), and how much they use each strategy (i.e., within-strategy

variability).

Our findings suggest that between-strategy variability relates to higher emotion

understanding and emotion management whereas within-strategy variability relates to higher

emotional understanding, but not higher emotion management. There has not yet been strong

theory outlining the conceptual differences between within-strategy versus between-strategy

variability. We suggest that within- and between-strategy variability can be theoretically mapped

to different stages of the Extended Process Model of Emotion Regulation (Gross, 2015). Within-

person variability corresponds to the perception stage (perceiving a need to regulate) as it reflects

In line with anonymous reviewers’ suggestions, we tested the separate linear and quadratic effects (using
orthogonal polynomials) of emotion understanding and emotion management on person-level and
ocassion-level variability, however none of the quadratic terms were signficant.
EI AND ER VARIABILITY 12

sensitivity to changes in emotion and environmental triggers of emotions. In contrast, between-

strategy variability corresponds to the selection stage (selecting a regulation strategy) as it

reflects differential or selective use of different regulation processes in each situation. This

distinction may help explain the different relationships with EI branches. At the perception stage,

one must assess the emotional context and decide that regulation is required. This requires an

astute understanding of the situational triggers of your emotions and the likely trajectory of your

emotional response (i.e., emotion understanding). There is not necessarily a role for knowing

which strategies will be effective in that situation (i.e., emotion management). Although emotion

management was hypothesized to be associated with this within-strategy variability, it may be

that emotion management skills plays less of a role in this early stage of the emotion regulation

process.

When interpreting these results, it should be noted that we were only able to assesses

regulation variability not regulatory flexibility with the current study. Regulation variability and

regulatory flexibility are conceptually and computationally related – with variability being a

necessary component of flexibility (Aldao et al., 2015); however, not all variability will be the

result of flexible emotion regulation. EI and the flexible use of emotion regulation do however

have substantial theoretical overlap and our results provide a straightforward test of this

hypothesis on which future research may build more complex models of EI and regulatory

flexibility. Indeed, this research raises important questions about how people develop a flexible

set of emotion regulation strategies and then go on to select and execute these strategies

effectively. While EI may play an important role in predicting this flexibility, it remains to be

seen whether this flexibility can be encouraged or taught either as part of, or distinct from,

broader EI training.
EI AND ER VARIABILITY 13

At a broader level, our findings highlight two key areas for future research. First, future

research might focus on identifying the person characteristics underlying individual differences

in regulatory flexibility, expanding to other conceptualizations of EI as well as emotion-relevant

personality and beliefs. For example, there may be differing effects for other streams of EI (such

as trait EI and self-beliefs about EI abilities), or other components of ability EI (such as emotion

perception abilities, emotion attention regulation, and emotional creativity; Elfenbein &

MacCann, 2017). Second, future research may focus on building the stronger theory on the

distinctive meaning of within-strategy and between-strategy variability (which we suggest

correspond to the identification and selection stages of emotion regulation in the Extended

Process Model).
EI AND ER VARIABILITY 14

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EI AND ER VARIABILITY 15

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Running head: EI AND ER VARIABILITY 17

Table 1.
Descriptive statistics, reliabilities, and bivariate correlations between person-level variables
M (SD) Alpha Omega 2 3 4 5 6
1. STEM 0.57 (.12) .65 0.69 .45 **
.01 .24* .00 .08
(.34,.56) (-.17,.19) (.11,.35) (-.18,.18) (-.08,.24)
2. STEU 0.59 (.15) .69 0.76 -.12 .30** -.15 .16*
(-.28,.03) (.17,.43) (-.30,.01) (.01,.30)
3. Between-strategy mean 2.55 (.73) .95 0.97 .45** .99** .40**
(.31,.58) (.99,1.00) (.25,.55)
4. Between-strategy SD 0.72 (.39) .93 0.96 .43** .55**
(.28,.58) (.37,.69)
5. Within-strategy Mean 2.50 (.72) .89 0.92 .38**
(.22,.53)
6. Within-strategy SD 0.91 (.31) .88 0.92
Note. **p < .001; *p < .05. Omega total is reported.
EI AND ER VARIABILITY 18

Table 2.

Person-level regression models and moment-level multilevel regression predicting ER variability with EI
Between-strategy SD Between-strategy SD Within-strategy SD Within-strategy SD
Predictor Beta CI p Beta CI p Beta CI p Beta CI p
Person
Level
BS Mean .45 .32, .58 <.001 .50 .37, 0.62 <.001
STEM .23 .10, .37 <.001 .07 -.08, 0.21 .349
WS Mean .38 .23, 0.52 <.001 .40 .26, 0.54 <.001
STEU .36 .23, 0.49 <.001 .20 .06, 0.35 .005
R2 .26 .15 .33 .18
Moment
Level
BS Mean .37 .34, .40 <.001 .38 .35, .41 <.001
STEM .15 .06, .24 .001
STEU .22 .14, .31 <.001
Marginal
R2 .16 .18
Note: BS = between-strategy; WS = within-strategy; STEM = Emotion Management; STEU = Emotion Understanding.
Running head: EI AND ER VARIABILITY 19

Figure 1. Correlations between EI and variability metrics. A-D depict person-level correlations,
while E-F depict moment-level correlations.