Just-in-Time Adaptive Interventions for Emotion Regulation

In the last 25-years, there has been an eruption of research on the prevalence and impact of work-related emotions. Research has shown that negative emotional reactions can impair employees’ task performance and result in counterproductive work behavior and, in severe cases, insider threat behavior. Much of this research has been guided by theories predicting causal event-emotion-behavior sequences.

However, the many empirical studies in this area are either correlational rather than causal (e.g., ecological momentary assessment studies) or conducted in the laboratory rather than in situ. This research will help employees gain strategies to regulate their emotions, thereby potentially improving task performance and deterring counterproductive and insider threat behavior.

Thus, the research has the potential to improve employee well-being. The research also has the potential to aid organizations in weakening the links between stressful events and insider threat behavior on the part of their employees. Finally, this research will illustrate the JITAI as a new and very different type of intervention that can fruitfully augment traditional interventions in a variety of topic areas within the organizational sciences (e.g., occupational safety interventions, sexual harassment prevention interventions, leader development interventions, and technical skills training interventions).

The current pair of studies will manipulate emotional experience via randomly assigned Just-in-Time Adaptive Interventions (JITAIs), also known as ecological momentary interventions. Tailored interventions are needed to help individuals regulate negative emotions in the moment—when most needed and before the resulting deleterious performance outcomes manifest.

As such, the JITAIs in the current research are focused on emotion regulation, thereby providing causal tests of the role of emotion on behavior as well as testing additional research questions involving situational and dispositional moderators of emotion-behavior relationships. Unlike standard interventions, these JITAIs are within-person interventions that capitalize on temporal states of vulnerability (e.g., high levels of negative emotion) and aspects of the current context (e.g., the nature of the emotion-causing episode, the feasibility of completing the intervention at that particular moment) to optimize treatment effectiveness.

Specifically, in the proposed studies, participants will repeatedly be randomly (re-)assigned to different cognitively-focused emotion reappraisal interventions or to no intervention (control condition) over the course of several work weeks. The reappraisal strategies to be contrasted against each other (and against a control condition) include imagining that a negative emotional stimulus or situation had a positive outcome, altering the impact of the emotional stimulus by adopting a more-or-less objective perspective, and interpreting the focal emotion in a manner that facilitates an accepting, observing, non-judgmental relationship to emotions.

The first study is a micro-randomized trial that will provide for causal inferences regarding emotion and the effects of three cognitive reappraisal JITAIs in achieving proximal (i.e., decision-point and day level) emotion and performance outcomes. The results from the first study will permit the optimization of decision rules (e.g., dropping a less effective intervention, including decision rules for which intervention should be used when based on context) to inform the second study.

The second study is a randomized control trial that will evaluate the effectiveness of the JITAIs in achieving distal (i.e., end-of-study and post-study) outcomes against control conditions.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.