Childhood maltreatment and emotion regulation in everyday life: An experience sampling study

Childhood maltreatment is a major risk factor for psychopathology, and increasing evidence suggests that emotion regulation (ER) is one of the underlying mechanisms. However, most of this evidence comes from cross-sectional studies and single assessments of habitual ER strategies. In the present study, we investigated the relation between history of childhood maltreatment, positive and negative affect, and multiple dimensions of spontaneous ER (strategy use, ER success, effort, and goals) in everyday life, using experience sampling method (3 assessments/day, for 10 consecutive days), in a sample of healthy volunteers (N = 118). Multilevel modeling results indicated that childhood maltreatment was associated with lower positive affect and higher negative affect. Childhood maltreatment was also related to lower use of reappraisal and savoring (but not suppression, rumination and distraction), reduced ER success (but not effort), as well as lower levels of and higher within-individual variability of hedonic (but not instrumental) ER goals. These results provide ecological evidence that individuals with a history of childhood maltreatment are characterized by differences in multiple ER dimensions.