Looking beyond the means and into momentary context: Associations between momentary affect and emotion regulation strategy use in major depressive disorder.

People with major depressive disorder (MDD) experience difficulties in emotion regulation (ER). Most ER research has examined overall strategy use using global self-reports in MDD, but this approach does not capture people's ER strategy use in daily life in the context of continuously changing ER demands, such as momentary affect. Taking a naturalistic approach, we investigated whether the associations between the use of six ER strategies (social sharing, acceptance, savoring, reappraisal, expressive suppression, and distraction) and momentary affect differed by MDD status. Data collection took place between 2017 and 2019. Adults with MDD and a healthy control group (N = 135) completed 2 weeks of experience sampling (five surveys a day), in which they reported on their momentary negative affect, positive affect (PA), and the extent to which they used the six ER strategies. Analyses were conducted using multilevel modeling. Both momentary negative affect and PA were associated with use of most ER strategies. MDD status did not moderate the association between negative affect and any strategy but significantly moderated the association between PA and two strategies. Specifically, PA was positively associated with the use of reappraisal and distraction for those with MDD only (associations were nonsignificant for healthy controls). Findings suggest that ER difficulties in MDD may be partially attributed to overusing certain strategies or ineffectiveness in using certain strategies during ER episodes. It is important for future research to clarify the directionality of these findings. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).