People Regulate Emotions During Spontaneous Thought Using Detectable Linguistic Signatures
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: Emotion regulation is a central process through which people shape their emotional lives, yet much of what we know comes from studies of deliberate attempts at regulation. In everyday life, regulation may emerge spontaneously, embedded within the flow of ongoing thought. If so, patterns of spontaneous thought–both what people think about and how thoughts move between ideas–may provide a window into emotion regulation as it naturally unfolds. Across two studies, we used a Think-Aloud paradigm to capture participants’ unconstrained streams of thought and tested whether these patterns captured strategy use and predicted mental health. In Study 1, participants (N = 233) completed nearly 5,000 Think-Aloud sessions over three weeks. We trained logistic regression models to identify emotion regulation strategy signatures and tested their generalizability on held-out data. We then tested whether expression of these signatures predicted emotional outcomes in held-out data from Study 1 and in an independent sample from Study 2 (N = 780). Models identified six strategies–acceptance, rumination, savoring, expressive amplification, reappraisal, and distraction. The strongest features aligned with theory (e.g., rumination with negative, repetitive thoughts; reappraisal with self-referential content and fewer positive-to-negative transitions). Moreover, individual differences in strategy expression predicted momentary changes in valence and both state and trait anxiety: acceptance, reappraisal, and savoring were associated with greater emotional improvement and lower anxiety, whereas rumination showed the opposite pattern. These findings reveal how emotion regulation is reflected in the content and dynamics of spontaneous thought and provide a predictive tool for identifying regulatory processes in everyday thinking.
Institution: Princeton University
Language: English
Topic: Mental Health via Writing
Subfield: Social Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7165454537