The need for change: Understanding emotion regulation antecedents and consequences using ecological momentary assessment

In the last decades, Emotion Regulation (ER) represented one of the most studied constructs within the psychological field. Most research, however, has been conducted in laboratory settings; consequently, there are still questions that need to be addressed concerning the deployment and consequences of ER in everyday life. Beyond traditional methods, ecological momentary assessment (EMA) via mobile devices (e.g. smartphones) has the potential to capture ER dynamics during the flow of daily experiences and in real-life settings. Compared to retrospective surveys and laboratory experiments, this approach allows to ecologically and repeatedly investigate the deployment of ER, as well as understand the direct consequences of this process on different aspects of daily life, including behaviors and affect. We will discuss what we currently know about the deployment and consequences of ER in real-life settings focusing on studies that investigated this process by means of EMA. In doing so, we will point out the potentialities of this approach both from a theoretical and clinical point of view.