Emotion regulation difficulties are key parts of many psychiatric disorders—especially internalizing disorders like depression, anxiety, and disordered eating. Many psychological studies have focused on intrapersonal emotion regulation (i.e., the deployment of strategies to modulate a person’s emotions solitarily) to learn more about its relation to disorders. Recent research by Dominic Denning, graduate student in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at UMass Amherst, has explored a different path, concentrating on interpersonal emotion regulation (IER; how people regulate their emotions dyadically through interpersonal networks) and its relation to eating disorders (ED).
“A lot of the sociocultural models for disordered eating indicate that there are a lot of interpersonal pressures put on people that can lead to body dissatisfaction, body image ideal internalization, and then ultimately disordered eating or body change efforts. A huge resource for folks is oftentimes utilizing their social connections with other people to help them regulate their emotions,” says Denning.
An individual who has emotion regulation difficulties may start using one or more of their social relationships to excessively seek support, reassurance, or to vent; leading to short-term positive intrinsic emotional consequences. Consequently, this behavior can damage rather than strengthen their relationships with others. The individual can be worse off in the long run as attempts to regulate their emotions through this means may stop working, cause interpersonal dysfunction, or lead to other maladaptive behaviors that make one feel better for a short time.
Denning’s study specifically looked at the habitual utilization of reassurance-seeking and venting to regulate emotions. Reassurance-seeking traditionally has been studied in anxiety disorders, as a consequence of intolerance of uncertainty. A person asks others for reassurance or guarantees about a topic, or they may make frequent check-ins with friends to reassure themselves that a relationship is still going well. Optimal levels of using this behavior can be beneficial to a person with anxiety, but if they're asking for reassurance too much, they may get on other’s nerves. Venting can be described as a person letting off steam, yelling, sending negative text messages, or externalizing their anger.
Denning offers some guidance on how IER can be helpful, “A positive way to do this would involve interpersonal problem solving. For example, you and a friend sit down and think about a situation that is evoking powerful emotions in that moment and discuss how you can work together to remedy your feelings. This really could just be using good interpersonal communication skills—talking about your feelings and reappraising the situation after hearing each person’s side of the story.”
Data for this study used a 2015 archive where a sub-portion of college students who had difficulties with emotion regulation completed daily diary entries. They were asked what kinds of stressors were coming up in their life, what specific intrapersonal emotion regulation strategies were they using in response to these stressors, and finally what were their subsequent behaviors.
The results of the study revealed that venting was associated with body dissatisfaction but not disordered eating behaviors. However, connections between reassurance-seeking and ED symptom severity as well as excessive exercise frequency were significant. Also, those individuals who had a probable ED diagnosis reported greater reassurance-seeking but not venting compared to nonprobable ED cases.
These findings suggest that for individuals with eating disorders, getting help with interpersonal skills in a group setting would be advantageous. “A lot of times folks who have EDs are receiving dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) and the emotion regulation module of that skills group is heavily focused on ‘how do I regulate my own emotions by checking the facts of the situation and making sure that my emotional response is consistent with the stimuli that's being presented to me and the actual risk.’ But there hasn’t been a whole lot of emphasis pertaining to the interpersonal effectiveness module, which is ‘how do I communicate to others to get what I need, get them to still like me, and maintain self-respect’”, says Denning.
“The goal is to expand their skills repertoire with how they're interacting with other people to replace those maladaptive behaviors like binge eating, purging, or problematic exercise, and maintain relationships. If they were interacting in a better way, it would decrease their maladaptive behaviors and hopefully increase social support and belonging.”
Denning’s research career overall focuses on the interpersonal emotional processes that stigma operates on to confer risk for maladaptive behaviors. A sister study to the one described has recently been completed involving dyads of college student female friends. Denning’s research team examined what types of intrapersonal and interpersonal emotion regulation strategies were used by the dyads and how these predicted certain dimensions of disordered eating. The team is trying to find out under what conditions intrapersonal and interpersonal emotion regulation matter and how certain strategies in an individual’s repertoire are being used.