EMOTIONALLY-FOCUSED MENTORING: A MULTI-METHOD ASSESSMENT OF EMOTION REGULATION

Abstract

Emotionally-Focused Mentoring is a novel intervention project that aims to enhance attachment security through the promotion of healthy emotion regulation skills specifically for insecurely attached college students. Although there are many self-report measures of emotion regulation, prior literature has not produced a method of capturing observed interpersonal emotion regulation over time. In the present study, I worked to identify if trained judges can reliably code observed emotion regulation across five weeks using an Emotion Interview task that we developed for the purposes of this study. I developed the Emotion Regulation Observable Coding Scale and recruited a team of five undergraduate coders, who served as the trained judges. In a sample of 82 college students who ranked high on attachment insecurity, I found that observed emotion regulation could be coded with a high degree of interrater reliability. However, contrary to the hypothesis that I participants would evidence improvements in emotion regulatory behaviors over time, I observed no significant changes in the primary outcome variable. Several reasons might explain this result, including that the Emotion Interview tasks may not have accurately captured interpersonal emotion regulation and future research would benefit from measuring observed emotion regulation in a more naturalistic environment. Nonetheless, continuing to explore how researchers might capture observed interpersonal emotion regulation remains an important endeavor.