The predictors of emotion regulation: Meta emotion, mood and emotional availability of parents

One of the lifelong development tasks of each individual who comes to the world is to learn how to regulate emotions effectively. The aim of this study is to examine the level of difficulty in emotion regulation experienced by individuals in emerging adulthood in terms of meta emotion, mood and parental emotional availability. In addition, the level of difficulty that individuals experience in emotion regulation was examined in terms of various demographic variables. The study group of this research consists of 882 people (58.2% women, 41.8% men) between the ages of 18-25. These individuals were contacted with the appropriate sampling method and Personal Information Form, Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale, Meta Emotion Scale, Brief Mood Introspection Scale and The Lum Emotional Availability of Parents Scale were used to collect data. The analysis of the data was done with the SPSS 25.0 program. Independent samples t test and one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) were used for the analysis of the research for demographic variables; and hierarchical regression analysis was used for the main research problem. As a result of the research, while the level of difficulty in emotion regulation of emerging adulthood individuals did not differ significantly according to gender, education level of the parents, marriage status of the parents and the perception that their fathers had a psychological problem; it differs significantly according to exposure to a traumatic perceived life event and perception that the individual and his mother have a psychological problem. As a result of the hierarchical regression analysis, it was found that the level of difficulty in emotion regulation significantly predicted the most meta emotion, then the mood and at least the parental emotional availability. While positive meta emotion, pleasant mood, mother and father emotional availability predict the level of difficulty in emotion regulation negatively; negative meta emotion and unpleasant mood predict it positively. These findings are discussed in the light of related literature.Keywords: emotion regulation, meta emotion, mood, emotional availability of parents, emerging adulthood