The Influence of Personality on Interpersonal Emotion Regulation in the Context of Psychosocial Stress

Robin Wickett (), Nils Muhlert and Karen Niven
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Robin Wickett: Alliance Manchester Business School, University of Manchester, Manchester M15 6PB, UK
Nils Muhlert: Division of Psychology, Communication & Human Neurosciences, University of Manchester, Manchester M15 6PB, UK
Karen Niven: Sheffield University Management School, University of Sheffield, Sheffield S10 1FL, UK

IJERPH, 2023, vol. 20, issue 4, 1-15

Abstract: Interpersonal emotion regulation is common in everyday life and important to various outcomes. However, there is a lack of understanding about the personality profiles of people who are good at regulating others’ emotions. We conducted a dyadic study, pairing 89 ‘regulators’ and ‘targets’, with the targets subjected to a psychosocial stressor in the form of a job interview, and the regulators instructed to manage the targets’ feelings prior to the interview. We did not observe any relationship between the regulators’ personality traits and the strategies that they reported using when trying to manage the targets’ feelings, nor between the regulators’ personalities and the targets’ job interview performance. However, the anxiety levels of the targets who were paired with more extraverted regulators fluctuated less across the multiple measures throughout the study, suggesting more effective interpersonal emotion regulation. Our findings suggest that extraversion may be the most relevant trait in shaping interpersonal emotion regulation, and that the influence of personality on regulatory effectiveness is unlikely to arise due to preferences for using different types of strategies.

Keywords: interpersonal emotion regulation; emotion regulation; personality; big five; trier social stress test (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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