Sense of purpose and emotion regulation strategy use: A mini-review with directions for future research

Abstract

Individuals with a stronger sense of purpose in life consistently exhibit less anxiety and depressive symptoms, in part due to their reduced reactivity to stressful situations. However, the affective, behavioral, and cognitive mechanisms underlying these associations remain somewhat unclear. The current brief review addresses this concern with respect to how sense of purpose may be associated with emotion regulation strategy use. Although relatively nascent, the emerging literature suggests that emotion regulation strategies may be integral to living a purposeful life. Our review highlights that while some strategies, such as cognitive reappraisal, have been consistently connected to a sense of purpose, others, including situation selection, merit further attention from the research literature. The brief review concludes by highlighting directions for future research, including the observation of whether a sense of purpose relates to polyregulation, as well as how individuals employ emotion regulation strategies in their daily lives.

Emotion dysregulation is a core component of anxiety and mood disorders (e.g., [13]), which has led researchers to outline how maladaptive regulatory strategy use could play a critical role in psychopathology [31]. These postulates have been supported by literature reviews showing that maladaptive emotion regulation strategies can serve as a risk factor for major depressive disorder [39], bipolar disorder [43], and mood disorders more broadly [32]. As such, research is needed to elucidate correlates of adaptive emotion regulation that also may mitigate risks for anxiety and mood disorders.

One potential candidate is a sense of purpose, which is defined as the perception one has direction in life that catalyzes greater life engagement [51], [54]. Meta-analyses have demonstrated robust associations between a higher sense of purpose and lower perceived stress across cultures [58], as well as reduced likelihood for depression and anxiety symptoms [5]. Notably, this latter review found that the link between sense of purpose and mental health was stronger for clinical populations dealing with anxiety concerns. These associations may result from the tendency for people with a stronger sense of purpose to avoid overreacting emotionally to daily events [28], [27]. However, although researchers have suggested tight connections between purpose and the process of emotion regulation (e.g., [34]), to date, there have been no concentrated efforts to characterize how sense of purpose relates to different emotion regulation strategies.

Examining connections between sense of purpose and emotion regulation (or reduced dysregulation) is critical for at least three reasons. First, identifying the regulatory strategies involved in purposeful living heeds calls for research into why a sense of purpose engenders homeostatic stability for individuals [8]. Sense of purpose centers on future-oriented goal progress [14], [42], which is important given that emotion regulation is a goal-oriented process [59]. Second, assessing change in emotion regulation could provide proximal, intermediary outcomes of interest for developing interventions and therapeutic strategies to promote a sense of purpose rather than judging efficacy. This point is critical, given that one study found that over half of the adults sampled wanted to change or develop their purpose [1]. Third, interventions and therapists working to reduce anxiety and depressive symptoms may wish to target emotion regulation strategies in tandem with sense of purpose. Though sense of purpose may ultimately provide resilience against anxiety and mood disorders, exploring what makes one’s life purposeful can be anxiety-producing [56]. As such, people equipped with more “adaptive” emotion regulation strategies may be better equipped to deal with the travails of purpose exploration.

The current mini-review provides one of the first evaluations of the extant literature around sense of purpose and emotion regulation strategies. Following Gross’s [20], [22] process model of emotion regulation, we review the accruing work on how sense of purpose relates to the five families of strategies (i.e., situation selection, situation modification, attentional deployment, cognitive change, and response modulation). Given the field is developing, we review below the few studies uncovered that focused directly on sense of purpose and the process model. In so doing, we highlight how certain strategies have received more attention than others, underscoring the need for future research linking purpose and emotion regulation. For each section, we begin by highlighting research that directly asked participants about their emotion regulation strategies, and then discuss studies that have examined sense of purpose in relation to the conceptual correlates of these strategies.

Sense of purpose and situation selection

Situation selection can be defined as efforts to choose which situations to enter or avoid to influence one’s emotional state [22], [20]. Situation selection has received limited attention in the emotion regulation literature [61], partly because this strategy must be employed before encountering an emotionally arousing event. While there have been some attempts to capture situation selection in the lab (e.g., [52]), research capturing how people utilize situation selection in daily life is limited [11]. As such, situation selection strategies have proven difficult to capture relative to strategies that occur consequent to the situation or emotional event, leading to a paucity of extant studies on sense of purpose and situation selection.

Further inquiry into situation selection, though, is particularly critical for understanding the role of purpose in daily life. A sense of purpose, by definition, involves the perception that one is directed to select activities that are more personally important, which in turn leads individuals to greater life engagement (see [51], [54]). Indirect support for this claim comes from research on how a sense of purpose fluctuates in daily life. For instance, when people experience a positive social interaction, they report a stronger sense of purpose that day [47]. Additionally, fulfilling family obligations has been linked to a stronger sense of daily purpose among youth [35]. Therefore, it appears that when individuals select into certain situations or tasks to regulate their emotions, it may yield a stronger sense of purpose in the moment. These findings have led researchers to suggest that purpose plays a critical role in how people “choose to live their daily lives” ([44]; p. 1631), underscoring how situation selection may be a critical element of purposeful living.

Sense of purpose and situation modification

Situation modification refers to any efforts to alter a given situation or environment with the intent of improving emotional well-being [22], [20]. Examples of situation modification can be difficult to distinguish from selection [21], and studies on modification often rely on experimental manipulation rather than self-report measures to capture whether one actively attempts to modify a given situation (e.g., [40], [60]). Therefore, it is unsurprising that limited research has examined associations between a sense of purpose and the use of situation modification. One study though, found that university students with a stronger sense of purpose were more likely to report trying to “fix the problem” when faced with a stressor during their first semester [41]. Although indirect, a sense of purpose may lead people to consider ways to solve or change a situation, as evidenced by its negative association with students’ reports of experiential avoidance in the same study.

Theoretical frameworks on purpose have emphasized that having a direction in life motivates one toward making purposeful progress [38], which likely involves changing one’s environment or situation to reduce distractions or obstacles. This proposition is supported by empirical findings linking a sense of purpose to lower impulsivity [10] and greater self-control [30]. Within affective science, a sense of purpose is also associated with less impulsivity in response to positive or negative moods [50]. As such, one would expect individuals with a higher sense of purpose to modify situations in daily life to reduce distress or other emotions; however, work is needed to examine this claim experimentally, given the lack of extant daily or momentary research.

Sense of purpose and attentional deployment

Attentional deployment reflects efforts to direct attention away from certain aspects of the situation and towards other elements to engender emotional change [22], [20]. Support for the link between attentional deployment and sense of purpose comes from experimental work examining responses to emotional stimuli [53]. In this study, participants were presented with pictures that were normed to arouse negative affect. Although sense of purpose was unrelated to the initial response, participants with a stronger sense of purpose exhibited a reduced eyeblink response following stimulus presentation. The researchers described these findings as initial evidence that individuals with a stronger sense of purpose may be better at refocusing their attention after a negative task in an effort to downregulate negative emotion.

Multiple studies also show that individuals with a stronger sense of purpose tend to shift their attention to regulate their emotions. For instance, one study [3] evidenced positive associations between a sense of purpose with the positive refocusing and focusing on planning subscales of the Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire [19]. Another study evidenced that adults with a stronger sense of purpose report being more likely to focus on the bigger picture [48]. Indeed, researchers have posited that an integral element of why a sense of purpose promotes adaptive development is that it “recenters one’s conscious attention toward a more prospective and overarching focus, causing everyday stimuli – such as stressors, challenges, and even uplifting experiences – to become less disruptive to the maintenance of wellbeing” ([8]; p. 1). This recentering hypothesis underscores that attentional deployment demands greater inquiry from purpose research in the future.

Sense of purpose and cognitive change

Cognitive change involves reappraising a situation to change its emotional impact [22], [20]. The Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ; [23]) is the most widely employed measure of regulatory strategies, specifically measuring the cognitive change strategy of reappraisal. As such, cognitive change has received more research attention than the strategies noted earlier. Multiple studies have suggested a robust positive association between sense of purpose and employing reappraisal strategies [3], [2], dating back to some of the original work using the ERQ (e.g., [23]). For instance, research highlights that sense of purpose is strongly associated with the tendency to find silver linings in a situation [48]. Sense of purpose also has been linked to a greater tendency to put things in perspective to avoid emotionally overreacting [3]. Scaffolded by this empirical work, researchers have suggested that cognitive reappraisal may be critical to pursuing purpose [34].

Similarly, researchers have noted that a sense of purpose may lead people to reappraise obstacles and stressors [24], [7]. In support, a sense of purpose has been consistently associated with the belief that one can find pathways around obstacles in their lives [6], [9]. However, further research is needed to address discrepancies in the existing literature regarding the relationship between sense of purpose and stress reappraisal. For instance, one recent study [57] found no correlation between a sense of purpose and having a more positive stress mindset, defined as the belief that experiencing stress can improve health and well-being [15]. Similarly, a sense of purpose holds inconsistent associations with the perceived ability to regulate stress [4]. One possible explanation is that a sense of purpose might be implicated more in how individuals reappraise specific situations rather than stress in general (for a discussion of the differences in reappraisal, see [18]).

Sense of purpose and response modulation

Response modulation can be defined as efforts to alter one’s affective experience after the emotion has been developed [22], [20]. Some examples of response modulation include substance use or overeating to alter one’s state, as well as exercising to relieve distress. Past work with the ERQ has shown that a greater sense of purpose is associated with a reduced likelihood of employing suppression, defined as the inhibition of emotion expression (e.g., [2], [23]). One study evidenced that sense of purpose showed medium-sized correlations with exercising to reduce anxiety, remembering that anxiety will not last, and trying to find humor in the distressing experience [48]. However, this study only found evidence for a modest, though significant, negative association between a sense of purpose and drinking alcohol and no association with eating as an anxiety-regulation strategy. Additional work on dietary motives found a medium-sized, negative correlation between sense of purpose and the motivation to eat for affect regulation [30].

Outside of the emotion regulation realm, evidence has been found for associations between a sense of purpose and healthier lifestyle behaviors in general [26], [37], [36]. Critically, given the likelihood of self-report biases when asking about healthy activities, this work has moved beyond only self-report methods by showing an association between sense of purpose and objective indicators of physical functioning, including pedometer counts [29] as well as grip strength [58]. That said, research suggests linkages between purpose and reduced risk for problematic drinking are less clear [36].

Conclusion and future directions

This brief review highlights the interconnections between emotion regulation strategy use and sense of purpose. In so doing, we hope to alert the mood and anxiety disorder field to a potential modifiable factor that may mitigate aginst emotion dysregulation. This review underscores the need for further inquiry into these associations, particularly with respect to situation selection and modification strategies. Even so, leading a purposeful life appears to implicate the use of multiple categories of strategies. This point aligns with past suggestions that a sense of purpose is correlated with greater psychological flexibility [33]. One clear future direction is to examine whether individuals higher on a sense of purpose are more likely to engage in emotion polyregulation (i.e., the concurrent or sequential use of multiple approaches to regulate emotions within a single emotion episode; [17]).

A limitation of the extant literature is its primary utilization of self-report measures and cross-sectional investigations, and lack of consideration of clinical samples. Multiple recent investigations have provided reliable and easy-to-administer measures of daily purposefulness (e.g., [45], [49]). Equipped with these measures, we strongly encourage greater inquiry into sense of purpose and emotion regulation during everyday life, which will provide insights into the likely bidirectional relationships between these constructs. Such work would benefit from asking participants why they selected into or away from given daily situations to see whether people make choices based on what is relevant for purpose pursuit or emotional regulation.

Regarding directionality, further work is needed to examine associations in the years preceding adulthood. Adolescence is an important developmental period for purpose (e.g., [12], [25], [46]), emotion regulation [55], [62], and mood disorders [13]. Therefore, efforts to consider developmental directionality may need to consider adolescent and emerging adult samples to more fully capture how purpose and emotion regulation strategies influence one another before tendencies on either front become more entrenched. When conducting this research, we strongly encourage researchers to conduct more contextualized investigations into emotion regulation during adolescence [16]. Through conducting further longitudinal and daily inquiries, researchers can make critical expansions regarding the interconnections between a sense of purpose and emotion regulation strategies.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.