Pursuit of Desired Affect among Young Adults

Emotions are the most humane thing about being alive. They are the cardinal element in the manifestation of a psychological illness and therapeutic interventions as regulating emotions is in fact an enormous challenge for every human being. Gross (1998) have presented the idea of affect regulation as an adaptive response to a situation. Affect regulation has been researched with both qualitative and quantitative approaches in the past literature, exploring its nature as a construct as well as a process. The present study has made the effort to view affect regulation in a similar way among young adults (age group: 18-29 years), since young adulthood is inherently a time of growth and settlement into a newer identity for the person that comes with its own set of build-in obstacles and given the socio-cultural and expanding turmoil in every direction, the research explores how effectively are the future of the country managing their emotions. The present study has adapted a mixed method approach and have taken Gross’s conceptualisation of affect regulation and has tried to broaden the psychological understanding into how strongly the young adults are able to regulate their emotions and what kinds of difficulties they are facing in that process. For this purpose, interviews were conducted which were subjected to thematic analysis for interpretation. Affect regulation as a construct has also been studied using the variables of difficulties in emotional regulation; emotional expressivity; and psychological defenses in the study. Since, there is a known strong connection between the attachment pattern and emotional development of the individual (e.g., Diamond & Fagundes, 2008), the study also dwells into the adult attachment pattern and how it is associated with the ability of an individual to regulate their emotions effectively. The data from the survey using standardized scales was analysed through Pearson Product Moment Correlation; Independent t-test; and ANOVA methods of statistical analysis. The findings supported the existing literature (e.g., Besharat, 2013; Ciocca et al., 2020; Prunas, 2019) on the nature of positive relationship between secure attachment and healthy regulation of emotions accompanied by more use of mature defense mechanisms as well as between insecure forms of attachment and poor affect regulation due to issues related to lack of emotional expression and adapting to immature defenses, among others. Gender differences were also observed where males had comparatively lesser difficulties in regulation, higher use of defense mechanisms and a stronger secure attachment than females.