Abstract
Everyone experiences emotions, but people vary in their orientations to and beliefs about emotions. Research has linked global beliefs about the controllability and usefulness of emotions with psychological functioning and well-being, but the mechanisms through which those beliefs shape people’s well-being remain unclear. Ford and Gross (2019) proposed emotion regulation as a candidate mechanism, such that emotion beliefs influence whether people initiate emotion regulation (identification), which strategies people use to regulate their emotions (selection), and how successfully people are able to implement their selected emotion-regulation strategies (implementation). We tested predictions based on Ford and Gross’s (2019) framework in everyday life in a seven-day experience sampling study (Australian community sample recruited in 2024; N = 326; 80% female; MAge=26.11, SDAge=8.52). At the identification stage, neither controllability nor usefulness beliefs were associated with initiating emotion regulation. In terms of strategy selection, stronger beliefs about the usefulness of negative emotions were associated with greater use of situation selection and lesser use of expressive suppression, as predicted. Finally, at the implementation stage, controllability beliefs did not moderate the hedonic effects of any regulation strategy, whereas usefulness beliefs about negative emotions predicted a weaker positive association between cognitive reappraisal and negative affect, and believing positive emotions to be more useful predicted a stronger inverse association between rumination and positive affect. Our findings suggest that individual differences in global emotion beliefs may play a smaller role than theorised in daily emotion regulation processes.