From the 6-8Th of August 2009 I attended the bi-annual meeting of ISRE. Besides the many wonderful talks, I will mostly remember all the nice people I met, and the interesting conversations I had.
I presented a poster at this conference and will include the abstract below. If you are interested in a handout, please do not hesitate to ask me.
This paper will articulate an undertheorised distinction between general affect regulation strategies and the tactics people adopt in everyday life to effect these strategies (Parkinson and Totterdell, 1999). Although some research hints at this distinction (Parkinson and Totterdell, 1999; Carver, Scheier and Weintraub, 1989), there is insufficient conceptual clarity, with different levels of activity often all being described as strategies. The present research takes the view that concrete tactics like taking a shower, and listening to music are at a different level to more abstract strategies like distraction and reappraisal. The former are the specific means to achieve the latter. It is suggested that location, situation and personal preference define which tactic is used for which strategy. To give substance to this proposal an empirical study was conducted, for which the most extensive list of strategies so far proposed was combined with a similar number of tactics derived from Parkinson and Totterdell’s 1999 study. Participants were asked to discriminate the items and, on basis of their judgment, a set of reliably judged strategies and tactics were identified. Participants demonstrated that they understand the difference between strategies and tactics. 24 of the 100 items were agreed by most participants to be strategies, and 23 were agreed to be tactics. This data provides confirmation of a robust and generally applicable distinction between these two levels of description. Thus, the same activity can be described both at strategic level (e.g. distraction) and at tactical level (listening to music as a means to distraction).
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