Navigating social waters: exploring the impacts of trait cognitive emotion regulation and emotion recognition ability in naturalistic social situations

People's habitual cognitive emotion regulation (CER) strategies have been shown to affect well-being, but their role in naturalistic face-to-face interactions remains underexplored. The present study investigated the role of CER styles in predicting self-reported and observer-rated social and affective outcomes in a sample of 152 undergraduate students who interacted either with a friendly or unfriendly confederate. Results showed that participants with more adaptive CER strategies reported higher positive affect and social competence and showed more positive social behavior across conditions. Neither condition or emotion recognition ability (ERA) interacted with CER, but higher ERA appeared to intensify negative effects of maladaptive CER on affect in a three-way interaction with condition. Exploratory analyses of specific CER strategies, like positive refocusing, suggest that difficulties in applying distancing strategies could explain these findings. This study supports the beneficial impact of adaptive CER in naturalistic social interactions and implies intricate mechanisms of different emotional competencies.