A Meta-Analysis of the Relationship Between Emotion Regulation and Social Affect and Cognition

Abstract

Researchers have proposed that emotion regulation can enhance or hinder socioaffective and sociocognitive processes. However, an integration of the evidence is still lacking. The present preregistered meta-analysis disentangled the link between adaptive and maladaptive emotion regulation and different aspects of social affect and cognition. Our findings, based on 549 effect sizes from 58 samples, show that adaptive emotion regulation is positively related to cognitive empathy (ρ = .22), affective empathy (ρ = .07), and compassion (ρ = .19) but negatively related to empathic distress (ρ = –.12). Furthermore, maladaptive emotion regulation is negatively related to cognitive empathy (ρ = –.11) and positively related to empathic distress (ρ = .19). Our findings open up new pathways for practitioners, as it might be possible to foster empathy and compassion and alleviate empathic distress through emotion regulation training. Furthermore, the results suggest a potential explanation for the link between mental disorders and interpersonal problems.