Relations between lab indices of emotion dysregulation and negative affect reactivity in daily life in two independent studies.

BACKGROUND

We investigated the extent to which physiological/biological measures of emotion dysregulation collected in the lab, resting respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) in Study 1 and amygdala activation in response to negative stimuli in Study 2, combined with daily measures of interpersonal stressors predicted negative emotional states in outpatients better than the stressors alone.

METHODS

Participants were adult outpatients with emotional distress disorders (N=30 individuals in Study 1, and N=26 women in Study 2). After completing a laboratory session that collected physiological/biological measures of emotion dysregulation, participants then completed 1-3 weeks of ambulatory assessment during which they reported on interpersonal stressors and negative affective states several times per day.

RESULTS

Laboratory measures of emotion dysregulation were largely unrelated to either momentary or mean levels of daily-life hostility, sadness, and fear in both studies. However, resting RSA significantly moderated the association between day-level interpersonal stressors and momentary fear such that low resting RSA strengthened this association. Similarly, amygdala activation tended to moderate this relationship in the predicted direction.

LIMITATIONS: Both samples were relatively small and focused on only a limited set of diagnoses associated with emotion dysregulation. Only two possible physiological/biological markers of emotion dysregulation were examined.

CONCLUSIONS

The current studies support the collection of physiological/biological data on emotion dysregulation when indexing daily-life emotion dysregulation as the degree of emotional reactivity to stressors in daily life among outpatients with emotional distress disorders.