Interpersonal Emotion Regulation in Everyday Life

INTERPERSONAL EMOTION REGULATION IN EVERYDAY LIFE 1
What Does Interpersonal Emotion Regulation Look Like in Everyday Life?
Anh Tran1
Katharine H. Greenaway1
Joanne Kostopoulos2
Elise K. Kalokerinos1
1
Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, University of Melbourne
2
Deakin University
Word count = 8,313
Author Note
The authors were supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project awarded to the
second and fourth authors (DP190103072) and an Australian Research Council Future
Fellowship awarded to the second author (FT190100300). Corresponding author: Anh Tran,
Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Australia.
anh.tran@student.unimelb.edu.au
Abstract
How often do people intend to engage in interpersonal emotion regulation in day-to-day life?
Existing literature has focused primarily on asking about the strategies people use to regulate,
which means researchers have little understanding of how often people actually aim to engage in
regulation to begin with. To answer this foundational question, we conducted two studies using
daily diary (N = 171) and experience sampling methods (N = 239). We explored how often
people use others to regulate their own emotions, and how often they regulate others’ emotions.
Almost everyone engaged in interpersonal emotion regulation at least once over the course of a
week, primarily with the goal to help themselves or others feel better, rather than worse. In fact,
people regulated others’ emotions nearly twice as often as they turned to others to regulate their
own emotions, and put more conscious effort into regulating others’ emotions compared to their
own. Trait perceived efficacy of engaging in interpersonal emotion regulation was the most
consistent predictor of momentary regulation intentions. The medium of the interaction—in
person or digital—did not consistently predict momentary intentions or effort. Together, these
findings provide a foundational picture of the interpersonal emotion regulation landscape, and
lay the groundwork for future exploration into this emerging subfield of affective science.
What Does Interpersonal Emotion Regulation Look Like in Everyday Life?
When the going gets tough, we often turn to other people. Indeed, up to 96% of the time,
emotional experiences are shared with others (Rimé, 2009). The experience, expression, and
regulation of emotions rarely occurs in a vacuum, but instead occur most often with and through
other people (Parkinson & Manstead, 2015). As a result, affective science is beginning to
highlight the interpersonal nature of emotions (van Kleef, 2021). Relatedly, emotion regulation
—a deliberate process that involves influencing emotions in response to a mismatch between
desired and actual emotional states (Mauss & Tamir, 2014)—is increasingly studied as an
interpersonal process (Niven, 2017; Zaki & Williams, 2013).
A growing body of research has focused on mapping the strategies and outcomes of
interpersonal emotion regulation (e.g., Hofmann et al., 2016; Niven et al., 2011; Swerdlow &
Johnson, 2020). However, this focus leaves a key gap in the literature: researchers know little
about the processes which occur prior to strategy selection and implementation. There is a lack
of empirical understanding of how often people intend to engage in interpersonal emotion
regulation in the first place, what they want to feel when they do, how much effort they put in to
achieving these goals, and what predicts people’s regulation intentions and effort. Understanding
these initial steps of the process is key to laying strong foundations in the interpersonal emotion
regulation literature. Thus, the present research seeks to address these basic questions about how
interpersonal emotion regulation unfolds in daily life.
What Do We Know About Interpersonal Emotion Regulation?
Existing research delineates interpersonal emotion regulation into two classes: intrinsic,
whereby we influence our own emotions by turning to other people; and extrinsic, whereby we
influence other people’s emotions (Zaki & Williams, 2013). Both intrinsic and extrinsic
interpersonal emotion regulation are critical for wellbeing. They help build new relationships
(Niven et al., 2012), enhance the quality of existing relationships (Debrot et al., 2013), and
increase popularity (Niven et al., 2015). In contrast, interpersonal emotion dysregulation is
associated with higher levels of psychological distress (Hofmann et al., 2016), which manifests
in increased anxiety and depression (Marroquín, 2011; Mennin et al., 2005).
Apart from documenting its relational and emotional outcomes, research has focused
largely on the strategies people use to regulate their own and others’ emotions. Converging
evidence suggests that people may seek to feel better or to make others feel better through
emotional support, cognitive support, and social modelling (Hofmann et al., 2016; Swerdlow &
Johnson, 2020), or make others feel worse through hostility and inauthentic display of emotions
(Austin & O’Donnell, 2013; Swerdlow & Johnson, 2020). Research has also uncovered people’s
preferences to give and receive emotional support (Pauw et al., 2018), as well as how to optimize
relational and affective outcomes by combining emotional and cognitive strategies (Feng, 2009).
However, while this ever-growing body of research can help us answer questions about the ways
in which people engage in interpersonal emotion regulation, there is still little understanding of
how often people actually intend to engage in it. Examining regulation intention is therefore an
understudied, but necessary, precursor to understanding how interpersonal emotion regulation
processes unfold.
What Don’t We Know About Interpersonal Emotion Regulation?
Intentions and goals
By focusing on how people regulate, strategy-focused research tacitly assumes that
people intend to regulate in the first place. Indeed, a standard interpersonal emotion regulation
questionnaire might ask people to rate the degree to which they use certain strategies from ‘not at
all’ to ‘a great deal’ (e.g., Niven et al., 2011). However, research from both laboratory and daily
life indicates that people do not always choose to engage in emotion regulation—a necessary
precursor to choosing a given strategy (English et al., 2017; Sheppes, 2020; Suri et al., 2015). As
such, it is important to first understand the earlier processes that determine whether interpersonal
emotion regulation occurs. To do this, we turned to the dominant theoretical perspective in the
broader emotion regulation literature: the extended process model (Gross, 2015).
This model outlines three stages of emotion regulation: (a) identification (assessing if
regulation is required); (b) selection (choosing a regulation strategy); and (c) implementation
(executing the regulation strategy). In the identification stage, a person notices an emotion and
decides whether there is a discrepancy between actual and desired emotion states, at which point
they may want to engage in regulation, with an emotion regulation goal (i.e., desired directional
change in emotion state) in mind (Tamir, 2021). Having an emotion regulation intention and goal
is therefore crucial to initiate strategy selection and implementation (Tamir et al., 2020). Thus,
examining intentions (do people want to regulate) and goals (how do they want to feel when they
do) is an important first step to understand how, and when, emotion regulation processes begin.
Effort
Closely tied to the concept of a goal is effort, operationalized as the intensity of goal
pursuit (Tamir, 2021). Leading theoretical frameworks for both personal and interpersonal
emotion regulation assume that when individuals intend to regulate emotions, they will put in the
effort to do so (Gross, 2015; Zaki & Williams, 2013). However, as a motivated decision-making
process, emotion regulation is subject to the default effect, wherein individuals gravitate towards
the default option that requires the least action (Thaler & Sunstein, 2008). In the case of emotion
regulation, when given the choice between regulating and not regulating negative emotions in the
lab, people’s default is to not put in effort at all (Sheppes, 2020; Suri et al., 2015). Outside of the
lab, people also do not always engage in effortful emotion regulation (English et al., 2017).
These findings, while specific to personal emotion regulation, highlight the need to investigate
how much effort people actually invest in regulating their own and others’ emotions. Knowing
the amount of interpersonal emotion regulation effort people put in will help researchers refine
theoretical models and advance more practically relevant research, such as interventions that can
promote regulation effort and engagement.
Predicting intention and effort
To gain a more holistic understanding of regulation intentions and effort, it is not enough
to ask simply how often and how much, we also need to investigate the factors that predict these
processes. Extant literature highlights the importance of both trait and state variables in shaping
personal emotion regulation (Doré et al., 2016; English et al., 2017). In the current research, we
focus on some key trait and situational factors as potential predictors of interpersonal emotion
regulation engagement.
At the trait level, one possible starting point is to consider people’s trait interpersonal
emotion regulation tendencies. Evidence suggests that when individuals have a chronic tendency
to engage in intrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation, they seek out others more following
emotional experiences; and when they believe doing so is effective, they benefit more from
receiving social support (Williams et al., 2018). Nevertheless, because these findings are based
on laboratory experimental designs, we still do not know if they translate to everyday behaviors.
In fact, recent work in the personal emotion regulation space has discovered that trait measures
do not always map well onto day-to-day engagement (Koval et al., in press). As such, we aim to
test the link between trait and state measures, by investigating whether trait tendency and
perceived efficacy of interpersonal emotion regulation predicts everyday intentions and effort
directed towards intrinsic and extrinsic forms of regulation.
At the situational level, the research spotlight has been on the interaction partner (English
et al., 2017; Liu et al., 2021). With the advent of digital communications, particularly during the
COVID-19 pandemic where face-to-face interactions are more difficult, people are socializing—
and regulating each other’s emotions—in increasingly comparable ways across media modalities
(Battaglini et al., 2021; Nguyen et al., 2020). This modality shift calls for an investigation into
whether individuals engage in interpersonal emotion regulation differently in-person compared
to digitally. We thus examine interaction medium as a predictor of everyday interpersonal
emotion regulation intentions and effort.
Measuring Interpersonal Emotion Regulation in Everyday Life
To gain a full picture of interpersonal emotion regulation, we need to capture the full
complexity and diversity of social interactions in which it occurs. Despite this need, most
research in this space has been based on global retrospective self-reports or laboratory
manipulations. While these methodologies have their own merits, they are perhaps not the best
suited to study the varied social interactions in which interpersonal emotion regulation occurs.
Retrospective self-reports may be susceptible to recall biases, which can affect ratings of
emotion intensity (Thomas & Diener, 1990). In addition, laboratory studies may lack ecological
validity. First, they only allow researchers to study few interactions, which do not reflect the full
range of social interactions that people have in daily life. Second, emotions induced in the lab
can be qualitatively and quantitatively different from emotions that occur in real life (Wilhelm &
Grossman, 2010), and thus in the lab it is not always the best place to study personally
meaningful and consequential emotional experiences which are critical for regulation processes
(Kuppens et al., 2022).
The limitations of traditional cross-sectional research methodologies can be addressed by
studying interpersonal emotion regulation in a more naturalistic setting. Ambulatory assessment
techniques, such as daily diary and experience sampling methodology (ESM), are well poised to
achieve this goal. With near-real time data collection that captures life as it is lived (Bolger et al.,
2003), these techniques can paint a more complete picture of what interpersonal emotion
regulation looks like in daily life.
Liu and colleagues (2021) were among the first to employ ESM to explore interpersonal
emotion regulation. Their research suggested that individuals share negative emotional
experiences with others roughly every other day, with the goal of seeking out emotion-oriented
and problem-oriented support. However, this work did not investigate regulation effort, nor did it
explicitly study regulation intention. Instead, it equated intention to the sharing of negative
emotional events and experiences, which does not always represent an attempt to regulate
emotions (Zaki & Williams, 2013). Our work aims to fill this gap by investigating regulation
intention as a deliberate process that individuals consciously intend to engage in (Niven, 2017;
Zaki & Williams, 2013), as well as the amount of effort they invest in regulation. Additionally,
the work by Liu and colleagues (2021) examined only the intrinsic side of interpersonal emotion
regulation, and focused only on negative events. This offers two further avenues for future work
to build on.
Negative events have been the focal point of emotion regulation research more broadly,
underpinned by the prohedonic assumption that regulatory attempts are centered around
downregulating negative emotions and upregulating positive emotions (Tamir, 2016).

Unsurprisingly, empirical evidence from personal emotion regulation research reveals that
people almost always hold affect-improving goals for themselves (English et al., 2017;
Kalokerinos et al., 2017) However, theoretical accounts propose that people can have affect-
improving or affect-worsening goals for both themselves and others, depending on what they are
trying to achieve (Niven, 2016; Niven et al., 2011; Tamir, 2016). While uncommon, affect-
worsening regulation does exist, although it has been investigated only rarely in the current
literature. As such, the research landscape is incomplete, with half the picture missing where (a)
extrinsic regulation and (b) affect-worsening goals should be. The current research provides
these missing pieces of the puzzle.
The Current Research
Interpersonal emotion regulation research is growing rapidly, but researchers have been
preoccupied with strategy selection and implementation, with little attention to the initial steps
underpinning these downstream processes. We sought to map the identification stage of
interpersonal emotion regulation using ambulatory assessment techniques, assessing both
intrinsic and extrinsic forms of interpersonal emotion regulation to answer four exploratory
research questions centered on intention and effort:
1. How often do people engage in intrinsic and extrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation?
2. What emotion regulation goals do people have when they intend to regulate?
3. When they have a goal, how much effort do people invest to achieve that goal?
4. What factors predict people’s interpersonal emotion regulation intention and effort?
Specifically, we capitalized on the ability of ambulatory assessments to capture
contextual factors to examine interaction medium, as well as to test the link between trait
measures of intrinsic (Studies 1 and 2) and extrinsic (Study 2) interpersonal emotion regulation
in predicting state regulation engagement.
We examined these questions using daily diary (Study 1) and experience sampling
methods (ESM; Study 2) to capture interpersonal emotion regulation as it occurs in real life.
These two methods have strengths that complement each other. On the one hand, daily diary
methods allow researchers to focus on the most significant social interaction of the day, and
therefore examine interpersonal emotion regulation for events that are most salient to people. On
the other hand, ESM, which surveys participants multiple times a day, allows us to understand
interpersonal emotion regulation for events that are relatively more quotidian. Together, these
studies will provide a more ecologically valid picture of what interpersonal emotion regulation
looks like in everyday life.
Study 1
Methods
Participants
The final sample consisted of 1711 participants, aged 18 to 62 (M = 28.96, SD =
11.81). One hundred and thirty-five participants were women, 33 were men,
and 3 were non-binary, preferred to self-identify, or preferred not to say.
Roughly half were single, and half were in a relationship. 77% of participants
were Australian, 11% were Chinese, 4% were Indian, and the remaining 8% were of 15
different nationalities.
1
Fifty-five participants were screened from further participation or excluded prior to analysis for the following reasons (some
participants failed multiple criteria): 16 were located outside the specified recruitment location, 22 completed the baseline in less
than 10 minutes which indicated careless responding, 5 formally withdrew, 2 were under 18 years old, 6 did not complete any
daily diary, and 17 displayed suspicious behaviors which suggested they were likely bots. Specifically, they shared similar
emails, signed up to the study within seconds of one another, and their metadata indicated unfeasible geolocation changes with
every survey. In addition, 6 participants completed the baseline survey twice, so we kept only the most complete entry.
We aimed for a threshold of 200 participants in our sample, with a minimum viable
sample size of 150. This threshold number was determined by our available funding, and the
minimum number would allow us to detect a between-person correlation of .17 with 80% power
and alpha level of .05, per a sensitivity analysis conducted using G*Power 3.1.9.7 (Faul et al.,
2009).
Participants were recruited as a part of a larger project, in which residency in Victoria,
Australia was an inclusion criterion. However, this criterion was not pertinent to the current
study. Recruitment occurred through a combination of an undergraduate psychology research
participation program and community advertising. Reimbursement for both pools of participants
were dependent on their level of participation in the study (see https://osf.io/ydujv/ for the full
reimbursement scheme).
Design and procedure
The project received ethics approval from The University of Melbourne Office of
Research Ethics and Integrity (ethics approval number 2056479.1). It consisted of three parts: a
baseline survey on Day 1, a 7-day daily diary portion, and a follow-up survey on Day 9.
Community participants completed a screening survey beforehand to determine eligibility. No
variables were analyzed from the follow-up survey for the purposes of the current study. The full
list of measures, collected as part of the larger data collection project, can be found at
https://osf.io/ydujv/
Baseline survey. At 9am on the first day of the study, participants received a link to the
baseline survey on Qualtrics, which closed at 7pm. Participants were ineligible to continue with
the study if they completed the baseline in under 10 minutes or did not reside in Victoria.
Daily diary surveys. Eligible participants proceeded to the daily diary portion of the
study. For seven consecutive days, daily surveys were sent out via Qualtrics at 5pm and expired
at 11:59pm the same evening. Each survey contained 54 items (11 of which were relevant to the
current study) assessing participants’ most significant social interaction of the day. If participants
did not have any interaction that day, they instead answered questions about a recent significant
interaction, which were included for even branching and were not of interest for this study.
Participants completed on average six out of seven daily diaries, yielding a mean compliance rate
of 85.96% (SD = 22.45), and a total of 1,029 daily diaries. In the current study, we analyzed 989
diaries (96.11%) in which participants indicated they had had a social interaction during the day.
Of the 171 initial participants, we analyzed data from 170 participants who had at least one
social interaction over the course of a week. One day after completing the daily diary portion,
participants completed a follow-up survey on Qualtrics. Then, they were debriefed and
compensated for their participation.
Measures
Baseline Measures
Interpersonal Regulation Questionnaire. To measure participants’ chronic use of
intrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation, we used the Interpersonal Regulation Questionnaire
(Williams et al., 2018). Participants indicated how much they agreed with each of 16 statements,
using a 7-point scale ranging from 1, strongly disagree to 7, strongly agree. This measure
yielded two dimensions: tendency to use intrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation (e.g., “When
things are going well, I feel compelled to seek out other people”; α = .89), and perceived efficacy
of intrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation (e.g., “I really appreciate having other people to
help me figure out my problem”; α = .86).

Daily Diary Measures
Social Interaction Medium. We asked participants to reflect on their most significant
interaction of the day. Social interaction was defined as a verbal exchange (e.g., in person, over
the phone, or using video chat services) or a written exchange (e.g., social media post, text
message) with another person that lasted more than 2 minutes. Participants then reported whether
this interaction occurred in-person, digitally, or both. Participants could also specify if the
interaction occurred in another medium not listed. For analyses involving interaction medium as
a predictor, we excluded responses that indicated interactions occurred both in person and
digitally, because it would be difficult to disentangle the potential effect of each distinct medium
on regulation intention and effort.
Emotion Regulation Intention. Reflecting on their most significant interaction,
participants indicated whether or not they tried to (1) use other people to influence their own
emotions (intrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation), and (2) influence the emotions of others
(extrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation).
Emotion Regulation Goals. Regardless of their intention to regulate, participants then
answered questions about regulation goals, by selecting one or multiple items that applied to
them from a list of five goals, adapted from Kalokerinos et al. (2017). Specifically, for both
intrinsic and extrinsic regulation, participants could indicate that they (1) had no goal, (2) wanted
to increase/maintain positive emotions, (3) wanted to decrease negative emotions, (4) wanted to
increase/maintain negative emotions, or (5) wanted to decrease positive emotions.
Emotion Regulation Effort. Three questions adapted from Gutentag et al. (under review)
asked participants how much effort participants invested in: (1) using other people to influence
their own emotions (intrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation), and (2) influencing the emotions
of others (extrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation). Participants responded using a slider scale
from 0, no effort at all, to 100, a lot of effort.
Data analytic strategy
We pre-registered our analysis plan at https://osf.io/ydujv/, after data collection and
preprocessing, but before any research questions were analyzed. Analyses were conducted using
RStudio (version 4.1.0). Emotion regulation intention responses were coded as 0, no and 1, yes.
In addition, we created a person-mean variable for intrinsic and extrinsic regulation, which
reflected the proportion of times a person intended to regulate.
Emotion regulation goal and effort analyses were conducted on observations where
participants intended to engage (1, yes) in the corresponding type of emotion regulation. Emotion
regulation goals were represented by a binary variable for each of the five response options for
each interpersonal emotion regulation category, coded as 0, did not endorse that option, or 1,
endorsed that option. On the very rare occasion when participants selected an emotion goal (e.g.,
increase/maintain positive emotions) and no goal simultaneously, we excluded that survey from
analysis, as their response constituted an intention conflict and/or noisy data.
We performed multilevel modelling using the package lme4 (Bates et al., 2015), fitting
two-level mixed effects models with measurement occasions (N = 989) nested within participants
(N = 170). All models included a random intercept for participant and random slopes for any
momentary predictors. All predictors at the person-level were grand-mean centered, which
involved subtracting each individual’s score from the sample’s mean score. This practice
allowed us to establish a meaningful zero point (Enders & Tofighi, 2007). The momentary-level
predictor interaction medium, which was categorical in nature, was entered uncentered to ease
interpretation of the effects (Nezlek, 2012).

We ran separate models predicting intrinsic and extrinsic interpersonal emotion
regulation. To predict intention, we ran six logistic models with binary outcome variables
(Models 1a-3b). To predict effort, we ran six generalized linear models with continuous outcome
variables (Models 4a-6b). Before interpreting the output of each model, we took a graphical
approach recommended by Fife (2020) to check model assumptions, using the R package sjPlot
(Lüdecke, 2020) to examine diagnostic plots. These checks revealed no assumption violations.
Results
Descriptive statistics for all variables in our analysis are presented in Table 1. Within-
and between-person correlations are in Supplementary Materials A.
Table 1.
Descriptive Statistics for Continuous Variables.
Study 1 (Daily Diary) Study 2 (ESM)
Variable M SDwithin SDbetween ICC α M SDwithin SDbetween ICC α
Momentary variables
Intrinsic intention 0.28 - 0.30 - - 0.25 - 0.23 - -
Extrinsic intention 0.45 - 0.32 - - 0.36 - 0.26 - -
Intrinsic effort 16.30 15.14 16.88 .35 - 45.20 16.35 17.71 .41 -
Extrinsic effort 26.63 20.36 20.69 .34 - 54.65 17.11 17.19 .38 -
Baseline variables
Intrinsic tendency 4.19 - 1.19 - .89 4.28 - 1.09 - .85
Intrinsic perceived efficacy 5.41 - 0.92 - .86 5.20 - 0.91 - .83
Extrinsic tendency - - - - - 3.67 - 0.72 - .86

Note. M = grand mean; SDwithin = within-person standard deviation; SDbetween = between-person standard deviation;
ICC = intraclass correlation coefficient. α = Cronbach's alpha. ICCs were not calculated for dichotomous variables
because there is no agreed upon method for their calculation.
Intentions
Slightly over half (64%) of participants turned to others to influence their own emotions
at least once during the study. On average, participants intended to engage in intrinsic
interpersonal emotion regulation 28% of the times they had an interaction.
In contrast, participants intended to engage in extrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation
more often, doing so 45% of the times they had an interaction. Most participants engaged in this
type of regulation, with 81% trying to influence others’ emotions at least once during the study.
Goals
Of the 277 diaries in which participants reported intending to engage in intrinsic
interpersonal emotion regulation, almost all focused on affect-improving goals (see Table 2),
mostly by upregulating positive emotions rather than downregulating negative emotions.
Similarly, of the 455 diaries in which participants reported intending to engage in
extrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation, almost all focused on affect-improving goals. Most
aimed to upregulate others’ positive emotions rather than downregulating their negative
emotions.
Table 2
Interpersonal Emotion Regulation Goals.
Study 1 (Daily Diary) Study 2 (ESM)

Intrinsic Extrinsic Intrinsic Extrinsic
Goals Frequency % Frequency % Frequency % Frequency %
Upregulating positive emotions 204 60.53 371 69.87 1675 78.27 1378 69.91
Upregulating negative emotions 0 0 9 1.69 67 3.13 47 2.38
Downregulating negative emotions 125 37.09 143 26.93 361 16.87 523 26.53
Downregulating positive emotions 8 2.37 8 1.51 37 1.73 23 1.17
Effort
The means, within-person standard deviations, between-person standard deviations, and
intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC) of the emotion regulation effort types are presented in
Table 1. On average, participants spent roughly 10% less effort intrinsically regulating their own
emotions using others, compared to extrinsically regulating other people’s emotions. Average
ICCs suggested that roughly 34% of variance was between-person, and 66% was within-person.
This implies that effort fluctuates more within an individual than across different individuals.
Predictors of intention
Interaction medium. Two logistic models examined whether interaction medium (in
person vs. digital) predicted participants’ intention to engage in intrinsic (Model 1a) and extrinsic
(Model 1b) regulation. The results of all intention models are presented in Table 3. Interaction
medium was not a significant predictor of participants’ intention to engage in either intrinsic or
extrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation. That is, participants were no more likely to engage in
interpersonal emotion regulation when they interacted in-person than they were digitally.
Intrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation tendency. Two logistic models examined
trait intrinsic tendency as a grand-mean centered predictor of intrinsic (Model 2a) and extrinsic
(Model 2b) intentions. We found that trait intrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation tendency
positively predicted intention to engage in intrinsic and extrinsic interpersonal emotion
regulation. For each one-unit increase in trait intrinsic regulation tendency, participants were
1.37 times more likely to turn to others to regulate their own emotions, and 1.35 times more
likely to regulate others’ emotions in a given social interaction.
Intrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation efficacy. We ran Models 3a and 3b in the
same fashion as Models 2a and 2b, this time with trait intrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation
efficacy as a grand-mean centered predictor. Results indicated that perceived efficacy
significantly predicted intention to engage in intrinsic and extrinsic interpersonal emotion
regulation. For a one-unit increase in trait intrinsic regulation efficacy, participants were 1.73
times more likely to turn to others to regulate their own emotions, and 1.71 times more likely to
regulate others’ emotions in a given social interaction.
Table 3
Results From Binary Logistic Analyses to Examine Predictors of Regulation Intention.
Model a: Intrinsic intention Model b: Extrinsic intention

Estimate OR Estimate OR
95% CI p 95% CI p
Parameters (SE) (SE) (SE) (SE)
Model 1: Interaction medium
-1.45 0.23 -0.37 0.68
Intercept 0.12, 0.44 <.001 0.45, 1.04 .073
(0.32) (0.08) (0.21) (0.14)
-0.02 0.98 -1.13 1.14
In-person interaction 0.50, 1.90 .949 0.75, 1.74 .539
(0.34) (0.33) (0.21) (0.24)
N / Observations 164 / 767 164 / 767
Model 2: IRQ tendency
-1.36 0.26 -0.24 0.79
Intercept 0.19, 0.35 <.001 0.62, 1.00 .054
(0.16) (0.04) (0.12) (0.10)
0.31 1.37 0.30 1.35
IRQ tendency (grand-mean centered) 1.06, 1.76 .016 1.10, 1.65 .004
(0.13) (0.18) (0.10) (0.14)
N / Observations 170 / 985 170 / 983
Model 3: IRQ efficacy
-1.36 0.26 -0.24 0.78
Intercept 0.19, 0.35 <.001 0.62, 1.00 .047
(0.16) (0.04) (0.12) (0.10)
0.54 1.73 0.54 1.71
IRQ efficacy (grand-mean centered) 1.22, 2.44 .002 1.30, 2.25 <.001
(0.18) (0.31) (0.14) (0.24)
N / Observations 170 / 985 170 / 983
Note. SE = Standard error; OR = odds ratio; CI = 95% confidence interval; N = number of participants. Significant
p-values are bolded.
Predictors of effort
Interaction medium. Models 4a and 4b examined interaction medium as a predictor of
intrinsic and extrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation effort, respectively. Because of a singular
fit issue, we removed the random slope for interaction medium from Model 4a. The results of all
effort models are presented in Table 4. These revealed no significant relationship between
interaction medium and either type of effort.
Intrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation tendency and efficacy. We ran four models
to investigate whether trait intrinsic tendency (Models 5a and 5b) and perceived efficacy
(Models 6a and 6b) predicted intrinsic or extrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation effort.
Neither trait tendency nor perceived efficacy significantly predicted how much effort participants
invested in interpersonal emotion regulation.
Table 4
Results From Generalized Linear Analyses to Examine Predictors of Regulation Effort.
Model a: Intrinsic effort Model b: Extrinsic effort

Parameters Estimate (SE) 95% CI p Estimate (SE) 95% CI p
Intercept 44.25 (2.65) 39.05, 49.44 <.001 53.16 (2.34) 48.58, 57.75 <.001
In-person interaction -2.23 (3.23) -8.57, 4.10 .491 -4.68 (2.50) -9.58, 0.21 .062
N / Observations 92 / 205 122 / 345
Intercept 45.71 (1.96) 41.87, 49.54 <.001 50.95 (1.81) 47.41, 54.49 <.001
IRQ tendency (grand-mean centered) 0.13 (1.70) -3.21, 3.46 .940 0.61 (1.57) -2.47, 3.69 .697
N / Observations 108 / 277 137 / 455
Intercept 45.49 (1.97) 41.62, 49.36 <.001 50.73 (1.81) 47.18, 54.28 <.001
IRQ efficacy (grand-mean centered) 1.37 (2.46) -3.46, 6.19 .580 2.25 (2.21) -2.08, 6.57 .310
N / Observations 108 / 277 137 / 455
Note. SE = Standard error; CI = 95% confidence interval; N = number of participants. Significant p-values bolded.
Study 2
Study 1 found that almost every participant engaged in interpersonal emotion regulation
at least once over the course of a week, and wanted to make others feel better nearly twice as
often as they did themselves. Participants who engaged in intrinsic regulation more at the trait
level, and believed it to be more efficacious, were also more likely to engage in everyday
interpersonal emotion regulation, although they did not put in more effort. At the situational
level, interaction medium did not predict regulation intention or effort.

The purpose of Study 2 was to examine whether these findings replicated across
methodologies and samples. While both studies shared fundamentally similar research questions
and measures, Study 2 employed ESM for a more fine-grained approach in identifying patterns
of everyday interpersonal emotion regulation. Furthermore, to complement the trait measure of
intrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation featured in Study 1 (Williams et al., 2018), we added a
trait measure of extrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation (Niven et al., 2011).
Methods
Participants
The final sample consisted of 2392 participants, aged 18 to 79 (M = 29.74, SD =
10.85). 170 participants were women, 62 were men, and 6 were non-binary,
preferred to self-identify, or preferred not to say. Roughly 40% were single,
while 60% were in a relationship. In terms of nationality, 73% of participants
were Australian, 9% were Chinese, 2% were British, 2% were Indonesian, 2%
were Singaporean, and the remaining 12% were of 16 different nationalities.
Recruitment occurred through a combination of an undergraduate psychology research
participation program, as well as university community advertising. Reimbursement for both
pools of participants were dependent on their level of participation in the study.
We aimed to recruit a minimum of 200 participants. This target sample size was
determined based on an a priori power analysis conducted using the t-method for multilevel
models (Murayama et al., in press). Our goal was to achieve 80% power with an alpha level
of .05. We used a t-value of 2.50, which corresponded to a small effect size of d = .20.
2
Thirty-two participants were excluded prior to analysis for the following reasons (some participants failed multiple criteria): 9
failed the attention checks, 3 were ineligible to continue to the ESM portion, 1 experienced technical issues, 4 formally withdrew,
6 did not complete any ESM surveys, and 9 had no baseline data. In addition, 5 participants completed the baseline survey twice,
so we kept only the most complete entry.
Design and procedure
The data collection procedure for this study was pre-registered at https://osf.io/5ze6p.
The project received ethics approval from The University of Melbourne Office of Research
Ethics and Integrity (ethics approval number 21361). It comprised two parts: a baseline survey
on Day 1, followed by a 7-day experience sampling period with 7 ESM surveys and one end-of-
day survey per day. Community participants completed a screening survey beforehand to
determine eligibility. All variables of interest were in the baseline and ESM surveys. The full list
of measures, collected as part of the larger data collection project, can be found in the data
collection pre-registration.
Baseline survey. On Day 1 of the study, participants received an email with instructions
to download the SEMA3 mobile application (Koval et al., 2019), and a link to the baseline
survey on Qualtrics, which they had until 4pm to complete. Participants read the Plain Language
Statement and provided informed consent, before completing a battery of trait measures. After
participants completed the baseline measures, they watched a video about the study explaining
its purpose and how to complete specific items in the ESM survey, and a video about the
SEMA3 app. Comprehension checks were included after each video to ensure participants
understood the ESM protocol.
ESM surveys. The following day, eligible participants began the 7-day ESM period.
Each day, participants received notifications to complete 7 ESM surveys from 9:30am to
7:00pm, for a total of 49 ESM surveys. We used a mixed sampling scheme, with each survey
randomly scheduled within a fixed time window. These windows were evenly distributed across
the day. Participants had 30 minutes to complete each survey from when they received the
notification. ESM surveys occurred an average of 89.97 minutes apart (SD = 12.63). Participants
also completed one end-of-day survey each day, scheduled at 8:00pm and expired at 11:59pm
the same evening, although this survey was not relevant to the current project.
Each ESM survey contained either 29 or 26 items depending on participants’ responses to
certain items. Six items were relevant to this project. Participants reflected on a social interaction
they experienced since the previous survey, and reported on their emotions, as well any emotion
regulation that occurred during the interaction. If participants did not report an interaction, they
instead answered questions about their current emotional state, which were included for even
branching and were not of interest for this study.
To monitor compliance, all participants received email reminders to complete surveys on
days 2 and 5 of the ESM period. Overall compliance was 74.49% (SD = 19.79). Participants
completed on average 36 out of 49 ESM surveys, for a total of 8,678 surveys. In the current
study, we analyzed 5,534 surveys (63.77% of surveys) in which participants had a social
interaction since the previous survey.
Measures
Baseline Measures
Interpersonal Regulation Questionnaire. As in Study 1, we used the Interpersonal
Regulation Questionnaire (Williams et al., 2018) to measure participants’ chronic tendency to
use intrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation (α = .85), and perceived efficacy of intrinsic
interpersonal emotion regulation (α = .83).
Emotion Regulation of Others and Self (EROS) Scale. We used the EROS scale (Niven
et al., 2011) to assess extrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation tendency. Participants reported
the extent to which they regulated others’ emotions in the past two weeks on a scale from 1, not
at all to 5, a great deal. The measure yielded two subscales: extrinsic affect-improving (e.g., “I
made someone laugh to try to make them feel better”; α = .86), and extrinsic affect-worsening
(e.g., “I acted annoyed towards someone to try to make them feel worse”; α = .69).
In the current study, we focused on the extrinsic affect-improving subscale, henceforth
referred to as extrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation tendency. The basis of this decision was
that there was low item endorsement for extrinsic affect-worsening (Niven et al., 2011), and
results from Study 1 indicated that extrinsic affect-worsening instances were extremely rare in
everyday life. Descriptive statistics and analyses involving the affect-worsening subscale are in
Supplementary Materials B and C.
ESM Measures
Social Interaction Medium. We asked participants to reflect on their most significant
interaction since the last survey. Social interaction was defined in the same way as Study 1.
Participants then reported whether this interaction occurred in-person, digitally, or in another
medium not specified. As in Study 1, we excluded responses that indicated interactions occurred
in an unspecified medium.
Emotion Regulation Goals. Goal items and response options were the same as Study 1.
Emotion Regulation Effort. Participants who indicated that they had a goal for intrinsic
and/or extrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation were asked how much effort they put into
achieving said goal. The effort questions and response options were also the same as in Study 1.
Data analytic strategy
The analysis plan for this study was pre-registered at https://osf.io/pvnas/, after data
collection and preprocessing, but before any research questions were analyzed. Analyses were
conducted using RStudio (version 4.1.0). Following the recommendations of Geeraerts (2020)
regarding careless responding, we excluded prior to analysis any items that were responded to in
less than 650ms, as well as any surveys that had more than 50% of items responded to in under
this time. As a result, 233 items (0.8% of all relevant items), and 62 surveys (0.7% of all
surveys) were identified and replaced with missing data.
To examine intentions, we created three binary variables based on participants’ response
to the emotion regulation goal items. The decision to measure intention and goal using one item,
as opposed to two items in Study 1, was to reduce response burden in the ESM protocol. If
participants indicated that they did not try to regulate, intention was coded as 0. If they indicated
that they had one or more emotion regulation goals, intention was coded as 1. We then created
two person-mean intention variables from the binary intention variables in the same way as
Study 1. We analyzed the goal and effort variables using the same analytic strategy as Study 1.
Data for Study 2 followed a multilevel structure with measurement occasions (N = 5,534)
nested within participants (N = 239). We conducted all inferential analyses using multilevel
modelling with the package lme4 (Bates et al., 2015). In addition to the three predictors of
regulation intention and effort that were also presented in Study 1, Study 2 also examined
extrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation tendency. This predictor was not included in our pre-
registered analysis plan. However, as with all analyses featured in the current paper, analyses
involving this predictor were exploratory in nature.
Similar to Study 1, we ran separate models for intrinsic and extrinsic outcome variables,
with eight logistic models to predict regulation intention (Models 1a-4b), and eight generalized
linear models to predict regulation effort (Models 5a-8b). Graphical checks of model
assumptions revealed no violations.

Results
Descriptive statistics for all variables in our analysis are presented in Table 2. Within-
and between-person correlations are in Supplementary Materials B.
Intentions
All 239 participants reported having had at least one social interaction during the study.
Of these participants, 82% intended to engage in intrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation at
least once over the course of a week. On average, participants turned to others in the interaction
to influence their own emotions 25% of the times they had an interaction.
Slightly more (92%) participants intended to influence others’ emotions at least once in
the study. On average, extrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation occurred 36% of the time.
Goals
Of the 1,278 surveys in which participants engaged in intrinsic interpersonal emotion
regulation, virtually all focused on affect-improving goals (see Table 2). As in Study 1, affect-
worsening goals were uncommon in everyday life.
Similarly, of the 1,924 surveys in which participants engaged in extrinsic interpersonal
emotion regulation, most goals also focused on improving others’ affect.
Effort
Descriptive statistics of the two effort types are presented in Table 1. On average,
participants invested roughly 10% more effort regulating other people’s emotions compared to
their own. The average ICC was around .39, suggesting—as in Study 1—that effort varied more
within-person than between people.

Predictors of intention
Interaction medium. We ran two separate logistic models to examine whether
interaction medium predicted participants’ intention to engage in intrinsic (Model 1a) and
extrinsic (Model 1b) interpersonal emotion regulation. The results of all models involving
intention are presented in Table 5. Once again, interaction medium did not significantly predict
intrinsic or extrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation intention.
Intrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation tendency. Models 2a and 2b examined trait
intrinsic tendency as a grand-mean centered predictor of emotion regulation intentions. These
showed that for a one-unit increase in trait intrinsic regulation tendency, participants were 1.28
times more likely more likely to turn to others to regulate their own emotions (intrinsic), but
were not more likely to regulate others’ emotions (extrinsic) in a given social interaction.
Intrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation efficacy. Models 3a and 3b examined trait
intrinsic efficacy as a grand-mean centered predictor of emotion regulation intentions. These
showed that for a one-unit increase in trait intrinsic regulation efficacy, participants were 1.59
times more likely to turn to others to regulate their own emotions (intrinsic), and 1.24 times more
likely to regulate others’ emotions (extrinsic) in a given social interaction.
Extrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation tendency. Models 4a and 4b examined trait
extrinsic tendency as a grand-mean centered predictor of emotion regulation intentions. These
showed that for a one-unit increase in trait extrinsic regulation tendency, participants were 1.47
times more likely more likely to turn to others to regulate their own emotions (intrinsic), but
were not more likely to regulate others’ emotions (extrinsic) in a given social interaction.
Table 5
Results From Binary Logistic Analyses to Examine Predictors of Regulation Intention
Model a: Intrinsic intention Model b: Extrinsic intention
Estimate OR Estimate OR
(SE) 95% CI p (SE) 95% CI p
Parameters (SE) (SE)
-1.56 0.21 -0.63 0.53
Intercept 0.17, 0.27 <.001 0.43, 0.65 <.001
(0.12) (0.03) (0.11) (0.06)
0.01 1.01 -0.17 0.84
In-person interaction 0.82, 1.26 .896 0.69, 1.03 .089
(0.11) (0.11) (0.10) (0.08)
N / Observations 239 / 5329 239 /5297
-1.53 0.22 -0.73 0.48
Intercept 0.18, 0.26 <.001 0.40, 0.58 <.001
(0.10) (0.02) (0.09) (0.04)
0.24 1.28 0.09 1.09
IRQ tendency (grand-mean centered) 1.06, 1.53 .009 0.92, 1.29 .317
(0.09) (0.12) (0.09) (0.09)
N / Observations 239 / 5417 239 / 5385
-1.53 0.22 -0.73 0.48
Intercept 0.18, 0.26 <.001 0.40, 0.58 <.001
(0.10) (0.02) (0.09) (0.04)
0.47 1.59 0.22 1.24
IRQ efficacy (grand-mean centered) 1.29, 1.97 <.001 1.02, 1.52 .031
(0.11) (0.17) (0.10) (0.13)
N / Observations 239 / 5417 239 / 5385
Model 4: EROS
-1.53 0.22 -0.73 0.48
Intercept 0.18, 0.26 <.001 0.40, 0.58 <.001
(0.10) (0.02) (0.09) (0.04)
0.39 1.47 0.01 1.01
EROS (grand-mean centered) 1.11, 1.95 .007 0.79, 1.31 .914
(0.14) (0.21) (0.13) (0.13)
N / Observations 239 / 5417 239 / 5385
Note. SE = Standard error; OR = odds ratio; CI = 95% confidence interval; N = number of participants. Significant
p-values are bolded.
Predictors of effort
Interaction medium. Models 5a and 5b examined interaction medium as a predictor of
intrinsic and extrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation effort respectively. Results from all
models predicting effort are presented in Table 6. There was no significant relationship between
interaction medium and intrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation effort. However, in-person
interaction was associated with less effort invested in regulating others’ emotions compared to
digital interaction, a novel finding compared to Study 1.
Intrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation tendency and efficacy. We ran four models
to investigate whether trait intrinsic tendency (Models 6a and 6b) and efficacy (Models 7a and
7b) predicted intrinsic or extrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation effort. As in Study 1, neither
trait tendency nor efficacy significantly predicted how much effort participants invested in
interpersonal emotion regulation.
Extrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation tendency. Extrinsic interpersonal emotion
regulation tendency significantly predicted effort for both intrinsic (Model 8a) and extrinsic
regulation (Model 8b). Indeed, results showed participants who scored higher on trait extrinsic
regulation tendency invested roughly 5-6% more effort in intrinsic and extrinsic forms of
interpersonal emotion regulation than those who scored lower on this trait.
Table 6
Results From Generalized Linear Analyses to Examine Predictors of Regulation Effort
Model a: Intrinsic effort Model b: Extrinsic effort
Parameters Estimate (SE) 95% CI p Estimate (SE) 95% CI p
Intercept 47.10 (1.60) 43.96 , 50.23 <.001 57.80 (1.29) 55.26, 60.33 <.001
In-person interaction -1.65 (1.39) -4.38, 1.07 .237 -3.69 (1.18) -6.00, -1.39 .002
N / Observations 196 / 1248 221 / 1896
Intercept 45.96 (1.27) 43.48, 48.45 <.001 55.48 (1.12) 53.29, 57.67 <.001
IRQ tendency (grand-mean centered) -0.12 (1.19) -2.45, 2.21 .919 0.65 (1.03) -1.37, 2.67 .530
N / Observations 197 / 1273 221 / 1938
Intercept 45.67 (1.26) 43.20, 48.13 <.001 55.38 (1.11) 53.21, 57.56 <.001
IRQ efficacy (grand-mean centered) 2.31 (1.41) -0.46, 5.07 .103 2.18 (1.23) -0.23, 4.59 0.078
N / Observations 197 / 1273 221 / 1938
Model 8: EROS
Intercept 45.53 (1.23) 43.11, 47.95 <.001 55.53 (1.08) 53.41, 57.64 <.001
EROS (grand-mean centered) 5.41 (1.79) 1.91, 8.92 .003 6.11 (1.54) 3.10, 9.12 <.001
N / Observations 197 / 1273 221 / 1938
Note. SE = Standard error; CI = 95% confidence interval; N = number of participants. Significant p-values are bolded.
General Discussion
Research on interpersonal emotion regulation is growing, but the spotlight has so far been
on the strategies people use to regulate, with little attention to the initial processes that precede
strategy selection and implementation. The present research contributes to mapping this
uncharted space. Using daily diary (Study 1) and experience sampling methodology (Study 2),
we conducted a comprehensive examination of interpersonal emotion regulation, investigating
both intrinsic and extrinsic forms of interpersonal emotion regulation, as well as affect-
improving and affect-worsening regulation goals. Our findings revealed that almost everyone
engaged in interpersonal emotion regulation, although at relatively low frequencies throughout
the week. Moreover, our research identified some overlap, but also some disconnects, between
trait and momentary measures of interpersonal emotion regulation constructs. In the next
sections, we revisit each of our initial research questions and discuss the implications of our
findings.
How Often Do People Engage in Interpersonal Emotion Regulation?
Almost everyone tried to regulate others’ emotions at least once in the sampling period of
a week, and they did so 36-45% of the time across their interactions. In contrast, fewer people
turned to others to regulate their own emotions, doing so 25-28% of the time. For Study 2, which
sampled participants seven times a day and thus allowed us to make more concrete judgment of
frequency, these percentages imply that intrinsic regulation occurred around once a day, as
opposed to nearly twice a day for extrinsic regulation.
Our findings suggest that when it came to emotions, people helped others more often than
turning to others for help. However, because support-seeking can happen at both conscious and
unconscious levels (Barbee et al., 1993), individuals may not always be aware that they are
turning to others for emotion regulation help in a social interaction. Extant theoretical
frameworks define interpersonal emotion regulation as a deliberate, conscious process (Niven,
2017; Zaki & Williams, 2013). This process was what our self-report measure captured, and thus
our findings on the frequency of intentions should not be generalized to the frequency of all
support-seeking and providing behaviors. Future work might do well to investigate more
unconscious forms of intrinsic support seeking, or to focus on contexts in which people are more
likely to reach out for support. Further, given the low frequencies of both intrinsic and extrinsic
regulation in everyday life, future researchers who wish to investigate everyday use of regulation
strategies might need to consider assessing people’s regulation intention first, to ensure that they
are capturing strategy use on occasions when people actually intend to regulate.
What Emotion Regulation Goals Do People Have When They Intend to Regulate?
The majority of emotion regulation goals focused on improving affect, primarily by
upregulating positive emotions. This pattern was consistent across intrinsic and extrinsic
interpersonal emotion regulation. The prevalence of goals to upregulate positive emotions was
somewhat surprising. Research often implicitly assumes that the crux of emotion regulation is to
downregulate negative emotions, such that emotion regulation strategies have become almost
synonymous with strategies to reduce negative emotions (see Webb et al., 2012 for a review).
Yet, our findings suggest that when people wanted to feel better, they more often wanted to
amplify the positive. It could be the case that striving to feel more positive is an approach goal,
whereas avoiding feeling negative is an avoidance goal. While both are central to wellbeing,
approach goals are easier to pursue and monitor, as well as potentially more useful in coping
with negative events (Tamir, 2021), and thus may hold more appeal than an avoidance goal
(Tamir & Diener, 2008).
Although affect-improving goals were most frequent, people endorsed affect-worsening
goals for others and for themselves 2-5% of the time. Research on affect-worsening is sparse,
likely stymied by the belief that it is a rare occurrence. Nevertheless, our findings suggest that
affect-worsening does exist in everyday life, and appears to be slightly more frequent for
interpersonal emotion regulation compared to 1.6% for personal emotion regulation (Kalokerinos
et al., 2017). Because the kind of goal people have can influence the strategies they choose to
achieve that goal (Millgram et al., 2019), investigating affect-worsening goals is a worthy
endeavor, as it can help researchers map out a more comprehensive taxonomy of emotion
regulation strategies, and better understand the downstream effects on regulation outcomes.
When People Have a Goal, How Much Effort Do They Invest to Achieve That Goal?
Across both studies, participants invested moderate levels of effort in achieving emotion
goals, scoring roughly 16 (Study 1) to 55 (Study 2) on a 100-point scale. They also spent
approximately 10% less effort in turning to others to regulate their own emotions, compared to
regulating others’ emotions. It is possible that since individuals could draw on intrapersonal
resources in addition to interpersonal resources when regulating their own emotions, intrinsic
regulation was relatively less effortful than extrinsic regulation. Furthermore, merely interacting
with others has been found to buffer against negative affect (Beckes & Coan, 2011). As a result,
people may benefit from this incidental interpersonal modulation, and thus need to put in less
conscious effort to seek help regulating their own emotions (Zaki & Williams, 2013).
What Predicts Interpersonal Emotion Regulation Intention and Effort?
Table 7 summarizes our findings across different predictors and outcome variables.
Interaction medium
There were no significant associations between interaction medium and regulation
intentions and effort. Across both studies, participants were no more likely to engage in
interpersonal emotion regulation when they interacted in-person than they were digitally, nor did
they consistently put in more effort in one medium compared to another.
To contextualize our findings, the studies collected data from September 2020 to August
2021, with every participant residing in Victoria, Australia. During this time, Victoria underwent
six stringent lockdowns due to the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, for a total of over 200
days under stay-at-home order by the end of the data collection period (Campbell, 2021). In
between lockdowns, restrictions were still enforced, including work-from-home and in-home-
visitor limit government directives that constrained face-to-face interactions. Victorians are thus
no strangers to digital communication replacing in-person interactions in every aspect of their
professional and personal lives. In a time when socialization and emotion regulation are
becoming more and more comparable across media (Battaglini et al., 2021; Nguyen et al., 2020),
our findings suggest that the medium of interaction—be it digital or in-person—did not influence
people’s intentions or effort to engage in interpersonal emotion regulation.
Trait predictors
We also investigated the overlap between trait measures of interpersonal emotion
regulation and daily measures of the same constructs. In particular, we tested whether trait
measures of intrinsic (Studies 1 and 2) and extrinsic (Study 2) interpersonal emotion regulation
predicted people’s momentary interpersonal emotion regulation behaviors in everyday
interactions.
Intrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation perceived efficacy. Individuals who
believed intrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation to be more efficacious—that is, more likely to
result in desired emotional outcomes—were more likely to intend to regulate their own and
others’ emotion, although they did not put in more effort to do so. High perceived efficacy of
intrinsic regulation, as measured by the IRQ scale (Williams et al., 2018), means individuals
have a positive attitude toward intrinsic regulation (i.e., turning to others is helpful), and
perceived behavioral control over intrinsic regulation (i.e., I can turn to others effectively for
help). Attitude and perceived behavioral control are two key predictors of behavior intention,
such that individuals are more like to intend to engage in a behavior if they have a positive
attitude towards it and believe they are capable to enacting it (Ajzen, 1991). Perhaps because the
IRQ perceived efficacy sub-scale captures both of these concepts, it was the most consistent
predictor of regulation intentions.
Intrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation tendency. Trait tendency to engage in
intrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation, as measured by the IRQ tendency sub-scale (Williams
et al., 2018), consistently predicted everyday intrinsic intention. This supports the measure’s
validity in mapping trait intrinsic tendency onto everyday intrinsic tendency. However, IRQ
tendency did not predict everyday regulation effort. As such, this measure appears to tap into
people’s decisions to regulate, but not necessarily how much effort they put into its
implementation. This could indicate that certain forms of interpersonal emotion regulation are
subject to the default effect, such that people take the path of least resistance by not investing
effort when it might be useful to do so (Sheppes, 2020; Suri et al., 2015; English et al., 2017). In
this case, what people generally reported doing (i.e., intention) did not always reflect how hard
they tried (i.e., effort). Further, inconsistency shown by the IRQ intrinsic tendency sub-scale in
predicting extrinsic constructs highlights the conceptual distinction between intrinsic and
extrinsic regulation, and calls for the use of separate but consistent trait measures to assess
intrinsic and extrinsic regulation concurrently.
Extrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation tendency. In Study 2, we included the
EROS scale to measure trait extrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation tendency, which
predicted everyday intrinsic, but not extrinsic regulation intention. However, trait extrinsic
tendency was significantly associated with both intrinsic and extrinsic regulation effort, such that
individuals high in trait extrinsic tendency exerted more effort when regulating their own or
others’ emotions in everyday life. This significant association was in contrast with trait intrinsic
tendency, which was not associated with everyday regulation effort.
One possible explanation for this finding may involve the measures of these traits. The
EROS scale, which measures extrinsic tendency, asks about individuals’ specific behaviors
within the past two weeks, and therefore relies on episodic knowledge. Conversely, the IRQ
scale for intrinsic tendency asks about individuals’ broad tendency and beliefs without a
specified time scale, and therefore relies on semantic knowledge (Robinson & Clore, 2002).
These two measures may thus capture conceptually different things, and have different predictive
properties when it comes to momentary constructs. That is, if people bring to mind specific
instances of interpersonal emotion regulation when answering the EROS, these instances may be
more closely linked to the strategies they use—and effort they put into using—in everyday life.
In contrast, as a general measure of propensity, the IRQ tendency scale seems to more directly
map onto people’s intentions to intrinsically regulate, rather than the effort they invest once
having decided to regulate.
This finding raises methodological considerations for the broader emotion regulation
literature—time scale of measurement and consistency across measures, particularly for intrinsic
and extrinsic regulation which typically are not typically assessed together in the same study.
Future works that build on the wealth of existing trait measures should not only consider
assessing intrinsic and extrinsic regulation concurrently, but also incorporate related momentary
constructs in the measure validation stage (McMahon & Naragon-Gainey, 2020).

Table 7
Result Summary of Models Predicting Intention and Effort Across Studies
Outcomes
Predictors Intrinsic intention Extrinsic intention Intrinsic effort Extrinsic effort
Situational level
Interaction medium û û û ?
Trait level
Intrinsic interpersonal
emotion regulation ü ? û û
tendency
Intrinsic interpersonal
ü ü û û
emotion regulation efficacy
Extrinsic interpersonal
ü û ü ü
emotion regulation tendency
Note. üconsistently positive and significant associations; ûconsistently non-significant
associations; ? inconsistent results across analyses. Extrinsic interpersonal emotion
regulation tendency was included in Study 2 only.
Limitations and Future Directions
These studies are among the first to paint a holistic picture of interpersonal emotion
regulation in everyday life. Further, the findings advance understanding of regulation intention
and goals, which are the initial steps that precede strategy selection and implementation.
Nevertheless, our studies have limitations that future work can address.
First, because participants could only report one significant social interaction per survey,
which occurred roughly 24 hours apart in Study 1 and 1.5 hours in Study 2, the data likely do not
reflect the full extent of social interactions that people experienced. Indeed, signal-contingent
designs for ambulatory assessments, as employed in our studies, capture roughly 1.6 times fewer
social interactions than event-contingent designs, in which people can start a survey on their own
every time an interaction occurs (Himmelstein et al., 2019). Future works may also consider
adopting such a design, which allows researchers to target the more emotionally intense
interactions critical for regulation processes (Kuppens et al., 2022).
Additionally, interpersonal processes involve more than one individual, while our
investigation only looked at one side of the interaction. In the future, examining both sides of the
dyad would help researchers answer more questions, such as whether an extrinsic interpersonal
emotion regulation attempt is effective in changing others’ emotions, or whether both parties in
an intrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation attempt share the same emotion regulation goals.
Apart from addressing these limitations, future studies can also explore new avenues that
the present research has introduced. First, our investigation into how much effort people spend
invites a follow-up question of whether this effort pays off. Second, to gain a deeper
understanding of what is driving interpersonal emotion regulation, we suggest looking beyond
emotion regulation goals, into the higher-order motives these goals serve (Tamir et al., 2020).
Motives have implications on both goals and strategies people use to achieve those goals
(Millgram et al., 2019), yet have not been explored in detail in the interpersonal emotion
regulation space to date.
Conclusion
The present study was the first to examine intrinsic and extrinsic interpersonal emotion
regulation concurrently in everyday life. Using a combination of daily diary and experience
sampling methodology, our research provides insights into the frequency, goals, effort, and
predictors of interpersonal emotion regulation. Our findings suggest that people intend to engage
in interpersonal emotion regulation less, and invest less effort in doing so, than research has
tacitly assumed up to this point. Further, they begin the work of mapping methodological overlap
between trait and momentary measures of interpersonal emotion regulation constructs. As a
whole, our work paints a nuanced picture of the emerging interpersonal emotion regulation
landscape, and introduces new research opportunities to discover how people can interact more
effectively with one another in day-to-day life.

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INTERPERSONAL EMOTION REGULATION IN EVERYDAY LIFE 1

What Does Interpersonal Emotion Regulation Look Like in Everyday Life?

Word count = 8,313

Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Australia.

consistent predictor of momentary regulation intentions. The medium of the interaction—in

What Does Interpersonal Emotion Regulation Look Like in Everyday Life?

—a deliberate process that involves influencing emotions in response to a mismatch between

interpersonal process (Niven, 2017; Zaki & Williams, 2013).

of empirical understanding of how often people intend to engage in interpersonal emotion

interpersonal emotion regulation unfolds in daily life.

What Do We Know About Interpersonal Emotion Regulation?

increase popularity (Niven et al., 2015). In contrast, interpersonal emotion dysregulation is

in increased anxiety and depression (Marroquín, 2011; Mennin et al., 2005).

understudied, but necessary, precursor to understanding how interpersonal emotion regulation

What Don’t We Know About Interpersonal Emotion Regulation?

Intentions and goals

By focusing on how people regulate, strategy-focused research tacitly assumes that

promote regulation effort and engagement.

Predicting intention and effort

directed towards intrinsic and extrinsic forms of regulation.

whether individuals engage in interpersonal emotion regulation differently in-person compared

to digitally. We thus examine interaction medium as a predictor of everyday interpersonal

emotion regulation intentions and effort.

Measuring Interpersonal Emotion Regulation in Everyday Life

(Kuppens et al., 2022).

The limitations of traditional cross-sectional research methodologies can be addressed by

studying interpersonal emotion regulation in a more naturalistic setting. Ambulatory assessment

regulation looks like in daily life.

downregulating negative emotions and upregulating positive emotions (Tamir, 2016).

these missing pieces of the puzzle.

The Current Research

underpinning these downstream processes. We sought to map the identification stage of

interpersonal emotion regulation using ambulatory assessment techniques, assessing both

research questions centered on intention and effort:

Specifically, we capitalized on the ability of ambulatory assessments to capture

in predicting state regulation engagement.

looks like in everyday life.

The final sample consisted of 1711 participants, aged 18 to 62 (M = 28.96, SD =

and 3 were non-binary, preferred to self-identify, or preferred not to say.

Participants were recruited as a part of a larger project, in which residency in Victoria,

study. Recruitment occurred through a combination of an undergraduate psychology research

Design and procedure

Community participants completed a screening survey beforehand to determine eligibility. No

compensated for their participation.

Interpersonal Regulation Questionnaire. To measure participants’ chronic use of

intrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation, we used the Interpersonal Regulation Questionnaire

help me figure out my problem”; α = .86).

Daily Diary Measures

Social Interaction Medium. We asked participants to reflect on their most significant

on regulation intention and effort.

Emotion Regulation Intention. Reflecting on their most significant interaction,

(extrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation).

Emotion Regulation Goals. Regardless of their intention to regulate, participants then

increase/maintain negative emotions, or (5) wanted to decrease positive emotions.

from 0, no effort at all, to 100, a lot of effort.

Data analytic strategy

We pre-registered our analysis plan at https://osf.io/ydujv/, after data collection and

reflected the proportion of times a person intended to regulate.

analysis, as their response constituted an intention conflict and/or noisy data.

interpretation of the effects (Nezlek, 2012).

We ran separate models predicting intrinsic and extrinsic interpersonal emotion

and between-person correlations are in Supplementary Materials A.

Descriptive Statistics for Continuous Variables.