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Socioeconomic status and emotion regulation: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Poster Session C - Sunday, March 8, 2026, 5:00 – 7:00 pm PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Hannah Hao¹ (), Yuhui Chen², Belen Lopez-Perez², Iris Mauss³; ¹Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, ²University of Manchester, ³University of California, Berkeley

Emotion regulation (ER) is crucially involved in functioning and mental health. Socioeconomic status (SES) involves individual and contextual characteristics that may fundamentally shape individual variation in ER. However, evidence on the relationship between SES and ER is mixed, and systematic reviews are lacking. Our meta-analysis revealed consistent SES-related differences in ER across various SES indicators, including income, education, and subjective SES. In children, lower SES was associated with greater emotion regulation difficulties with a medium effect size (r= –.23, 95% CI [.17, .30], n=2,562), based on teacher- and parent-report of socioemotional competence. Among adults, lower SES was associated with less use of cognitive reappraisal (r = .07, 95% CI [.05, .10], n=108,996), and more use of expressive suppression (r = –.07, 95% CI [–.12, –.03], n=29,356), with a small effect size based on self-report. Although behavioral measures showed no clear SES differences for ER success, a small number of neuroimaging studies indicated that lower SES was associated with reduced prefrontal cortex activation during lab-based reappraisal tasks. These results suggest potential inefficiency in top-down control mechanisms supporting ER among lower-SES individuals. However, lower-SES individuals might utilize compensatory neural or cognitive strategies that help maintain regulatory performance. Overall, our findings highlight the importance of integrating multi-level measures to assess SES-ER relations. Finally, if SES-related differences in ER are robust, interventions focused solely on ER strategies might have limited efficacy unless the broader structural and contextual barriers associated with socioeconomic disadvantage are addressed.

Topic Area: EMOTION & SOCIAL: Emotion-cognition interactions