The Role of Emotional Regulation Strategies in Predicting Resilience and Psychological Well-Being in Adults: A Meta-Analysis

Abstract

The control of emotions has become one of the most important predictors of human psychological health and resilience throughout the adult life, determining how people react to stress, balance their emotions, and adjust to life. This meta-analysis is a systematic review and synthesis of the evidence on how adaptive and maladaptive emotional regulation strategies relate to important measures of resilience and psychological well-being in adults. The studies included were taken after covering a wide range of populations and cultural contexts and analyzed as per PRISMA 2020 guidelines using a random-effects model to consider the methodological variability.

The results of the analysis demonstrated strong and steady tendencies: strong positive relations between adaptive emotional regulation tactics, in particular, cognitive reappraisal, acceptance, and mindfulness-based regulation, and increased resilience (r = .42), as well as, higher levels of psychological well-being (r =.51). Contrastingly, maladaptive habits like rumination, suppression and avoidance of emotion were highly connected with increased levels of psychological distress (r = -.39) and reduced well-being (r = -.44). Moderation analyses have shown that the adaptability of these strategies, mainly the capacity to alternate adaptive and context-sensitive approaches, was an important protective mechanism of emotional stability and post-adversity recovery in adults.

These results highlight the key role of emotional regulation flexibility to sustain mental health and encourage resilience across the adult lifespan. Its implications go further into the domains of clinical psychology, neuropsychology, and positive psychology and provide empirical evidence in support of interventions aimed at improving adaptive regulation skills, including mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) and acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT). It finds that the advancement of adaptive emotional regulation is among the potent directions to enhancing psychological resilience, avoiding emotional depletion, and enhancing well-being in both clinical and non-clinical groups of people.