Brief Report: How rejection sensitivity and advice seeking influence emotion regulation use and effectiveness

Previous research on Emotion Regulation (ER) has often focused on the social factors that influence the use of regulation strategies and has shown that ER has a strong social component. The present study adopts an individual differences approach and aims to investigate how two rarely-explored dispositions that relate to social behavior, rejection sensitivity and advice seeking, influence ER, while controlling for the effect of other variables, including personality traits. To this end, 96 individuals completed an online questionnaire that assessed their scores on the two dispositions and on the Five Factor Model traits, as well as the perceived use and effectiveness of 14 strategies. Hierarchical regression results showed that the two dispositions were differentially associated with the use and effectiveness of specific strategies, beyond other variables. Specifically, rejection sensitivity was negatively related to the use of Putting-into-perspective (p = .02) and to the effectiveness of Catastrophizing (p = .03), while advice seeking was inversely associated with the endorsement of Suppression (p = .001) and positively with the success of Other-blame (p = .008). Thus, our study suggests that these constructs are important when examining individual differences in ER and provides valuable insight into the understanding of regulation patterns.