UCLA

Decades of research demonstrate that emotion regulation — the collection of strategies people use to manage emotional states — is critical for health and well-being. However, most of this research focuses on how we regulate our own emotions. In everyday life, we often receive help from others with managing our emotional states, and, in the absence of supportive relationships, physical and mental health tend to suffer. To understand how relationships impact wellbeing, it is critical to unpack how social interactions shape emotion regulation processes. Across four separate studies using a novel dyadic paradigm designed to examine how social support from friends can impact emotion regulation, this dissertation tests: (Paper 1) whether social support can potentiate emotion regulation strategies in-the-moment; (Paper 2) whether the effects of social support linger to facilitate emotion regulation when people are alone; and (Paper 3) whether features of vocal expression — namely acoustic pitch — influence social emotion regulation outcomes. First, we found that reappraising negative stimuli (i.e., reinterpreting its content to change its emotional impact) was more effective with help from a friend, as compared to reappraising independently. We found that this difference was not driven by the quality of reappraisals, or a mere buffering effect from hearing the friend’s voice, suggesting that social support selectively potentiated reappraisal efficacy. Next, we showed that social support improved regulatory outcomes both in-the-moment when receiving support and when people encountered the same stimuli again on their own, demonstrating how social interactions can help prepare individuals to independently cope with distressing events. Finally, we demonstrated that higher support giver pitch during social emotion regulation was associated with better regulatory and relationship outcomes, providing insight into how people effectively communicate during supportive interactions. By investigating how social relationships can be leveraged to improve emotion regulation, this work advances our understanding of how social contexts shape health and wellbeing over time and highlights potential pathways for ameliorating emotion dysregulation.