Adolescent emotion polyregulation flexibility: An ecological momentary assessment of emotion regulation contingency and links to perceived success

Adolescents often report using a repertoire of strategies to regulate their emotions. However, global characterizations of strategy use provide limited insight into the dynamic processes of everyday emotion regulation (ER). It remains unknown whether adolescents can use multiple ER strategies simultaneously within a given emotional event and adjust strategies flexibly as their emotions shift, namely, emotion polyregulation flexibility. Leveraging the Bray-Curtis dissimilarity index to quantify sequential changes in both emotions and ER strategies within and across days, we examined whether adolescents (a) engaged in polyregulation flexibility, as evidenced by contingent prompt-to-prompt variability in emotion and ER, and (b) perceived greater regulatory success afterward. Adolescents (N = 117, ages 13-15, 55% girls) completed ecological momentary assessments for 14 days (four prompts per day), rating the intensities of four negative emotions, their efforts using six ER strategies, and regulatory success, along with one-time surveys on trait-level emotional mindset and awareness (as covariates). Using multilevel modeling, greater emotion intensity and variability predicted greater ER variability, supporting adolescents' engagement in flexible polyregulation. Further, coupled, unidirectional effort changes across multiple strategies-rather than switching between strategies-uniquely predicted greater perceived regulatory success. These findings offer direct empirical evidence for adolescents' capacity to flexibly draw from their repertoire of ER strategies to adapt to shifting emotions in everyday life, underscoring the need to move beyond static measurement (e.g., overall counts, ranges) of individual strategy use toward dynamic approaches for capturing the unfolding of ER processes.