The “What” in Polyregulation: Context-Sensitive Use of Idiographically Effective Emotion Regulation Strategies Is Associated with Better Affective Outcomes

Polyregulation refers to employing multiple strategies to regulate emotions within a single emotional episode. However, evidence on its affective outcomes remains inconclusive, likely due to reliance on strategy count as the operationalization of polyregulation and the overlook of context sensitivity. Across two independent ecological momentary assessment (EMA) studies from the United States (Study 1, N = 158, 12,217 observations) and China (Study 2, N = 144, 11,347 observations), we introduced the effective strategy ratio, the ratio of idiographically effective strategies to total strategies used, to evaluate the overall quality of polyregulation. We directly tested whether the joint contribution of context sensitivity and the overall quality predicted various indices of momentary psychological distress. Total number of strategies was associated with increased distress at lower levels of the effective strategy ratio, but with reduced distress at higher levels. Context sensitivity magnified the benefits of high effective strategy ratio but was less helpful when the ratio was low. The results were robust across culturally distinct samples and after controlling for lagged distress. These findings underscore the utility of the effective strategy ratio and highlight the synergistic benefits of flexibly aligning idiographic effective strategies with contextual demands. We emphasize the importance of moving beyond strategy count to focus on overall quality and prioritizing context-sensitive emotion regulation in future affective science research.