Personality Shapes Emotion Regulation Differently in Teens and Adults, Iranian Study Finds

Adolescents and adults may draw on friends and family to manage their emotions in strikingly different ways depending on their personality makeup, according to a new cross-sectional study of 634 people in Iran. Researchers found that while the overall frequency of interpersonal emotion regulation strategies differed only modestly between the two age groups, the personality traits linked to those strategies shifted dramatically from adolescence to adulthood. The work, published in the journal Borderline Personality Disorder and Emotion Dysregulation, suggests that developmental stage and personality dispositions together shape how people turn to others for emotional support.

Interpersonal emotion regulation, or IER, refers to the use of social interactions to manage emotional experiences. Unlike intrapersonal strategies such as cognitive reappraisal or emotional suppression, IER inherently involves other people, whether through seeking comfort, gaining perspective, or modeling how others cope. The study focused on the “target” role, examining how individuals use others to regulate their own emotional states rather than how they act as regulators for someone else.

The research team, led by Negin Andaroon and colleagues at institutions affiliated with Zanjan University of Medical Sciences, recruited 317 adolescents aged 11 to 18 and 317 adults aged 19 to 65 from the city of Zanjan in 2024. Participants completed questionnaires online, including the Interpersonal Emotion Regulation Questionnaire, which measures four strategies: enhancing positive affect, perspective taking, soothing, and social modeling. Personality was assessed with age-appropriate instruments, the Big Five Questionnaire for Children for adolescents and the NEO Five-Factor Inventory for adults, a choice the researchers made to strengthen measurement validity across the two groups.

Using multivariate analysis of variance, the team found a statistically significant but small overall effect of age group on IER strategies, with Pillai’s Trace of 0.018 and a partial eta squared of 0.018. Follow-up univariate analyses with a Bonferroni-adjusted threshold revealed that adolescents scored significantly higher than adults on the enhancing positive affect subscale, a difference that remained significant after correction. No significant age differences survived the adjusted threshold for perspective taking, soothing, or social modeling, even though adolescents reported numerically higher mean scores on all four subscales.

The more striking findings emerged when the researchers examined how personality traits related to IER within each age group separately. Among adults, neuroticism was negatively correlated with enhancing positive affect and social modeling, while openness to experience showed negative associations with enhancing positive affect, perspective taking, and social modeling. Agreeableness in adults was negatively correlated with perspective taking, soothing, and social modeling, suggesting that more agreeable individuals may report less frequent use of overt or directive interpersonal strategies, possibly prioritizing relational harmony instead. Conscientiousness, by contrast, was positively correlated with all four IER dimensions in adults.

Adolescents displayed a markedly different pattern. Neuroticism, openness to experience, agreeableness, and conscientiousness were all positively associated with most or all IER strategies in this younger group. Openness showed particularly strong positive correlations, ranging from 0.24 to 0.57 across the four subscales. Extraversion was the exception, showing a selective association only with soothing, indicating that a general tendency toward sociability in adolescence may translate into greater reliance on others for comfort during distress but not necessarily into broader use of interpersonal regulation.

The researchers caution that the correlational and cross-sectional design precludes any causal conclusions. All personality-IER associations were exploratory, conducted without formal correction for multiple comparisons, and the authors note that some statistically significant findings may reflect chance. They also highlight that the IERQ’s measurement invariance across age groups was not formally tested, meaning observed between-group differences could partially reflect measurement artifacts rather than substantive developmental variation. Low internal consistency of the openness scale in the adult sample further complicates interpretation of findings involving that trait.

The study’s setting in Iran adds another layer of interpretation. The authors note that Iranian sociocultural norms around emotional expression, interpersonal reliance, and the role of close social networks differ from mainstream Western settings, and that cultural variables were not directly assessed. They suggest that in more collectivistic contexts, emotional autonomy and restraint may be valued differently, potentially shaping how traits like openness relate to reported interpersonal regulation. These interpretations remain tentative hypotheses warranting systematic cross-cultural investigation.

Another limitation involves the broad adult age range of 19 to 65 years, which may have masked meaningful heterogeneity within adulthood. The authors also note high inter-correlations among the IER subscales, meaning they could not determine whether a given personality trait is uniquely associated with a specific strategy or reflects a broader general regulatory tendency. Future research using multivariate regression or structural equation modeling could help isolate unique variance contributed by each trait.

Despite these caveats, the findings underscore that developmental stage matters when considering how personality relates to emotion regulation. The researchers suggest that certain traits, including openness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism, are associated with greater reported use of social emotion regulation strategies during adolescence, whereas in adulthood these same traits may in some cases exert a more constraining influence. They emphasize that these results may inform future research on educational programs and psychological interventions, although longitudinal work is needed before practical applications can be established.

Subject of Research: Age-related differences in interpersonal emotion regulation strategies and their associations with Big Five personality traits among adolescents and adults

Article Title: Interpersonal emotion regulation and its relationship with the Big Five personality traits across two age groups: adolescents and adults

Article References: Andaroon, N., Karami, E., Lotfinia, S., Kalke, Y. M., Sarani Yaztappeh, J., & Mousavi, S. E. (2026). Interpersonal emotion regulation and its relationship with the Big Five personality traits across two age groups: adolescents and adults. Borderline Personality Disorder and Emotion Dysregulation, 13(1), Article 36. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40479-026-00360-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40479-026-00360-4

Keywords: interpersonal emotion regulation, Big Five personality traits, adolescence, adulthood, cross-sectional study, emotion regulation strategies, neuroticism, conscientiousness, openness to experience, Iran, developmental psychology, peer relationships