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In preparation

Daily Variation in Self-Rated Distress Tolerance and Emotion-Regulation Strategies in an At-Risk Community Sample

Rutgers, A., Gilbert, K. J., & Conway, C. C.

2026Collaborative study

Two questions hidden inside one score

A person’s general sense of tolerating distress may not describe what happens on a particularly difficult day.

This collaborative project distinguishes stable differences between people from fluctuations within the same person across a 10-day experience-sampling design. It asks how distress tolerance and regulation strategies are organized at both levels without treating them as interchangeable.

Separate people from days

Typical differences and day-specific shifts should not be interpreted as the same process.

This view compares people’s typical levels across the study period.

A multilevel design for regulation

The study keeps the person-level and day-level questions visible at once.

LevelBetween-person and within-person
Data10-day experience sampling
ConstructsDistress tolerance and emotion regulation
OriginAva Rutgers’s thesis project

What changes when the unit is the day?

The level of analysis changes the psychological interpretation.

  1. 01

    Which patterns describe differences between people?

  2. 02

    Which patterns describe changes within one person?

  3. 03

    How does the level of analysis change the psychological interpretation?