Affective Flexibility: Relations to Expressive Flexibility, Feedback, and Depression

Theory and research on emotion regulation have shifted from emphasizing the adaptiveness of specific strategies to flexible regulation. Studies on the modulation of emotional expression, or expressive flexibility (EF), have demonstrated a close link between flexibility and psychological adjustment. The present study extended this line of research to the modulation of subjective emotional experience. We developed the affective flexibility (AF) task, which measures individual differences in the ability to up-regulate and down-regulate subjective feeling. We examined relations between AF and EF tasks, and how each task related to feedback and depression. Performance on the two tasks was moderately correlated. Feedback did not modulate task performance, but there was an overall improvement in AF over time. Improvement in AF abilities were incrementally associated with lower depression. Specifically, after controlling for change in expressive abilities, improvements in up-regulation and down-regulation of affect were each significantly inversely associated with depression.