title: Situation selection is a particularly effective emotion regulation strategy for people who need help regulating their emotions.
abstract: Situation selection involves choosing situations based on their likely emotional impact and may be less cognitively taxing or challenging to implement compared to other strategies for regulating emotion, which require people to regulate their emotions "in the moment"; we thus predicted that individuals who chronically experience intense emotions or who are not particularly competent at employing other emotion regulation strategies would be especially likely to benefit from situation selection. Consistent with this idea, we found that the use of situation selection interacted with individual differences in emotional reactivity and competence at emotion regulation to predict emotional outcomes in both a correlational (Study 1; N = 301) and an experimental field study (Study 2; N = 125). Taken together, the findings suggest that situation selection is an effective strategy for regulating emotions, especially for individuals who otherwise struggle to do so.
authors.affiliation: a Department of Psychology , University of Sheffield , Sheffield , UK.
authors.forename: Thomas L
authors.initials: TL
authors.lastname: Webb
authors.affiliation: b Department of Psychology and Neuroscience , University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill , Chapel Hill , NC , USA.
authors.forename: Kristen A
authors.initials: KA
authors.lastname: Lindquist
authors.affiliation: b Department of Psychology and Neuroscience , University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill , Chapel Hill , NC , USA.
authors.forename: Katelyn
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Jones
authors.affiliation: b Department of Psychology and Neuroscience , University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill , Chapel Hill , NC , USA.
authors.forename: Aya
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Avishai
authors.affiliation: b Department of Psychology and Neuroscience , University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill , Chapel Hill , NC , USA.
authors.forename: Paschal
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Sheeran
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D002755:Choice Behavior / Q000502:physiology*; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007206:Individuality; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D000068356:Self-Control / Q000523:psychology*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Emotion regulation; reappraisal; situation selection; suppression