Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, policy makers have tried to balance the effectiveness of lockdowns (or stay-at-home orders) with their potential mental health costs. Yet, two years into the pandemic, we are still lacking solid evidence about the emotional toll of lockdowns. Across two intensive longitudinal datasets with 14,511 observations collected in Australia in 2021 (total N = 441), we compare the degree, persistence, and regulation of people’s emotions on days in and out of lockdown. We find that lockdowns take an emotional toll, but that this toll is relatively mild. In lockdown, people experienced slightly more negative and slightly less positive emotion; returned to a mildly negative emotional state more quickly; and used low-effort emotion regulation strategies. We conclude that people are resilient to the challenges lockdowns pose to personal and social well-being.

The growing literature on interpersonal emotion regulation has largely focused on the strategies people use to regulate. As such, researchers have little understanding of how often people regulate in the first place, what emotion regulation goals they have when they regulate, and how much effort they invest in regulation. To understand the identification stage of the regulation process, we conducted two studies using daily diary (N = 171) and experience sampling methods (N = 239), exploring interpersonal emotion regulation in the context of everyday social interactions. We found people regulated others’ emotions nearly twice a day, regulated their own emotions through others around once a day, and regulated both their own and others’ emotions in the same interaction roughly every other day. Further, not only did people regulate others’ emotions more often than regulating their own emotions through others, but they also put in more effort to do so. The goals of regulation were primarily to make themselves or others feel better, most often through increasing positive emotions, rather than decreasing negative emotions. Together, these findings provide a foundational picture of the interpersonal emotion regulation landscape, and lay the groundwork for future exploration into this emerging subfield of affective science.