Depressed individuals want to feel more unpleasant emotions in daily life, but try harder to decrease them.

Abstract

Prior research has demonstrated that depressed individuals want to feel relatively more intense sadness and less intense happiness than nondepressed individuals do. However, it has rarely been tested whether these differences extend to daily life and how they might be related to attempts to regulate emotions. We assessed what depressed (n = 58) and nondepressed (n = 62) individuals wanted to feel in daily life and how much they tried to regulate their emotions, using Ecological Momentary Assessments. To better understand motivated emotion regulation in depression and what underlies it, we moved beyond sadness and happiness and targeted four discrete emotions that differ by valence and arousal (i.e., sadness, anxiety, happiness, and calmness). Data were collected during 2021-2022. We found that while both depressed and nondepressed individuals reported wanting very low levels of unpleasant emotions, depressed individuals wanted to feel more sadness and anxiety and less happiness in daily life than nondepressed individuals did. At the same time, depressed individuals attempted to decrease their sadness and anxiety more than nondepressed individuals did. Our conclusions are limited to a sample of relatively young adult students. Our findings suggest that emotion dysregulation in depression may involve a misalignment between what individuals want to feel and how they attempt to regulate their emotions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).