2 - (SYM 86) Where Might Emotion Regulation Go Awry in Adults with Major Depressive Disorder in Everyday Life? Associations Between Positive Affect and Emotion Regulation Strategy Use

Background: People with major depressive disorder (MDD) experience difficulties with emotion regulation (ER; Liu & Thompson, 2017). Most research has used global self-reports to assess habitual ER strategy use, which, albeit useful, are subject to recall biases and capture constructs beyond the target (Koval et al., 2022). Further, research has primarily focused on ER of negative affect (NA); ER of positive affect (PA) needs greater attention as diminished PA is a cardinal symptom of MDD. Thus, we used experience sampling of daily life to examine links between ER strategy use and PA in MDD.

Methods: Via 2-week experience sampling, adults with current MDD (MDDs; n=48) and healthy controls (CTLs; n=87) repeatedly (5x/day) reported on their momentary affect and use of six ER strategies (distraction, reappraisal, acceptance, savoring, suppression, social sharing). We used multilevel modeling to examine group differences in contemporaneous associations between momentary PA intensity and strategy use, controlling for momentary NA intensity.

Results: Across groups, PA was associated with greater use of distraction, reappraisal, acceptance, savoring, and social sharing, but not with suppression. MDD status moderated the association between PA intensity and strategy use for distraction, reappraisal, acceptance, and savoring. Greater use of distraction and reappraisal was associated with higher PA for MDDs, but not for CTLs. Greater use of acceptance and savoring was more strongly related to higher PA for MDDs than for CTLs. All findings held controlling for person mean levels of PA and NA.
Conclusion: Our findings suggest that levels of PA were more positively associated with use of several strategies for MDDs than for CTLs. As affect and strategy use were assessed contemporaneously, PA may be a cause or consequence of strategy use. For example, greater use of certain strategies (e.g., distraction) at high levels of PA in MDDs could reflect MDDs inappropriately intervening when PA is high, possibly to down-regulate PA due to discomfort with intense PA. Alternatively, it could suggest that MDDs need to engage in certain strategies (e.g., savoring) to a greater extent than CTLs to achieve high levels of PA. Future research should clarify the directionality of these findings, motivational and contextual factors explaining stronger PA-strategy links in MDD, and their possible roles in understanding the course of MDD. Our findings highlight the complex nature of ER in MDD and the importance of working towards a nuanced understanding of ER in everyday life.