2025 Theses Doctoral

A Three-Study Examination of Emotion Regulation: Addressing Challenges in Assessment

Clayton, Michal

Emotion regulation, or individuals’ attempts to influence emotional experience or expression, is a transdiagnostic process related to the development, maintenance, and treatment of multiple mental health conditions. Despite a proliferation of research over the past 20 years, emotion regulation remains difficult to assess with accuracy and precision, limiting opportunities for study comparison and hampering targeted treatment development. Across three studies, this dissertation addresses key challenges to emotion regulation assessment.

Study 1 introduces and examines the psychometric properties of a novel self-report measure of behavioral dysregulation across two samples. Study 2 examines relationships among momentary negative affect and emotion regulation, and later worry and rumination, in a sample of individuals with generalized anxiety disorder and healthy controls. The use of ecological momentary assessment (EMA) methods in this study further highlights the importance of capturing the functional nature of regulatory processes as they unfold in real time.

Finally, Study 3 also uses EMA to examine associations between momentary emotion regulation and recall bias in self-reported negative and positive emotion in a transdiagnostic clinical sample. The dissertation concludes with a general discussion regarding the implications of these three studies for improving emotion regulation assessment, including limitations and avenues for future research.