The regulation of recurrent negative emotion in the aftermath of a lost election

For some American voters, the news of Mr. Trump's victory in the 2016 presidential election caused recurrent emotions that were negative, persistent, and intense enough to elicit repeated attempts at emotion regulation. This afforded a rare opportunity to analyse the regulation of recurrent emotions in a natural, non-laboratory context. The regulation of recurrent emotion involves additional considerations relative to single-instance emotion, such as representations of past and future encounters with the emotion-eliciting variables, ongoing consequences of each regulatory episode, and a tendency to repeatedly deploy emotion regulation strategies that one is most familiar with in the context of the particular recurrent emotion. Despite the ubiquitous nature of recurrent emotions, its associated regulatory processes have been infrequently examined and are not well-understood. Over eight days (11/10/16–11/18/16), we administered four surveys to 202 participants who voted against Mr. Trump. We examined the determinants and outcomes of regulatory strategies in the context of recurrent emotion. We found that (1) reappraisal (compared to distraction and acceptance) was associated with greater decline in emotion intensity, (2) high-intensity emotions were more likely to be distracted, whereas low-intensity emotions were more likely to be reappraised, and (3) strategy variability was associated with greater affective adaptation.