(PS10-D76) Savoring for Being Well: The Interplay Among Adaptive Emotion Regulation and Psychological Wellbeing

Psychological well-being is considered a protective factor for mental health, reducing the risk of developing psychopathological processes, and enhancing recovery from mental disorders and physical illnesses. Previous studies have shown that adaptive emotion regulation can play a key role in well-being in clinical and non-clinical populations. Specifically, emotional awareness -defined as the tendency to attend to and acknowledge emotions- has been related to greater levels of positive affect and wellbeing. To our knowledge, the underlying mechanisms of this relationship are still unknown. In this regard, we hypothesize that savoring -defined as the awareness of positive experiences and the use of positive emotion regulation strategies to enhance and extend positive feelings- could be a possible mediational variable between emotional awareness and well-being. That is, we hypothesize that savoring would contribute to increase well-being once the individuals has attended to emotions, as the emotional attention is a core component of positive emotional amplification. The aim of this study was to clarify whether savoring is a mechanism underlying the relationship between the emotion regulation strategy of emotional awareness and psychological well-being. The sample consisted of 411 individuals (63% female) aged between 18 and 75 (M = 29.35; SD = 10.05). Participants filled in the “Difficulties of Emotion Regulation Scale” (Gratz & Roemer, 2004), the “Ways of Savoring Checklist” (Bryant & Veroff, 2007), and the “Mental Health Continuum Short Form-14” (Keyes, 2009). A simple mediation analysis using PROCESS 4.0 (Hayes, 2018) showed a significant indirect effect, b = -.13, 95% CI [-0.20, -0.07], in which higher emotional awareness led to higher levels of savoring which, in turn, led to higher levels of psychological wellbeing, accounting for 24.92% of the variance. The direct effect of emotional awareness on psychological well-being was also significant, b = -.66, 95% CI [-0.20, -0.07], explaining 17.75% of the variance. Findings suggest that attending emotions promotes psychological wellbeing, but it may also increase through the use of savoring strategies. This mechanism could have important clinical implications, emphasizing the need to address the regulation and amplification of positive emotions to promote psychological well-being.