Emotion regulation strategy use in PTSD: A daily life study

Posttraumatic Stress Disorder is associated with emotion regulation difficulties. However, our understanding of these difficulties has been limited by the reliance of previous work on retrospective trait self-reports, which are unable to capture dynamic, ecologically-valid use of emotion regulation strategies. To address this issue, this study used an ecological momentary assessment (EMA) design to understand the impact of PTSD on emotion regulation in daily life. We conducted an EMA study in a trauma exposed sample with varying levels of PTSD severity (N = 70; 7 days; 423 observations). We found that PTSD severity was linked to greater use of disengagement and perseverative-based strategies to manage negative emotions, regardless of emotional intensity. Study design did not allow investigation into the temporal use of emotion regulation strategies and small sample size. This pattern of responding to emotions may interfere with engaging with the fear structure and thus impair emotion processing in current frontline treatments; clinical implications are discussed.