A Daily Diary Experimental Manipulation of Validation and Invalidation: Predicting Affect, Hope, and Self-esteem

Invalidation (defined as punishment, trivialization, or negation of someone’s private experience; Linehan, 1993) is an interpersonal stressor thought to contribute to the development of emotion regulation disorders. Research examining the impact of invalidating and validating statements has focused on in-moment reactions to single session lab manipulations. For example, invalidation has been shown to lead to increases in negative affect (NA), skin conductance, and heart rate (Shenk & Fruzzetti, 2011) and to larger decreases in positive affect (PA; Benitez & Cheavens, 2014), while validation has been shown to lead to lower levels of aggressive responding among individuals high in emotion regulation difficulties (Herr, Jones, Cohn, & Weber, 2015). However, prior research has failed to examine the repeated impact of invalidation across time and has focused on a limited range of outcomes. Other clinically important variables, such as hope and self-esteem, may also fluctuate in response to validating and invalidating messages. The present study sought to understand how the experimental manipulation of repeated validating and invalidating comments impact levels of hope, self-esteem, and affect over the course of six time points as measured through daily diary assessment. An additional focus of the study was to determine how BPD symptoms moderate the impact of the manipulation on the three outcomes. The study utilized a six-day daily diary methodology. Participants were recruited from introductory psychology courses, and 110 (of the 126 enrolled) completed all six time points. Participants alternated between writing about a problem (at Times 1, 3, and 5) and receiving “peer support” for their problem (at Times 2, 4, and 6). In reality, participants were randomly assigned to receive standardized validating or invalidating messages. Participants completed measures of affect, hope, and self-esteem each day. Results found a significant interaction between time and condition predicting NA such that being invalidated the first time led to higher levels of NA, which decreased over the course of the study as individuals repeatedly received invalidating comments. Conversely, individuals who were validated started lower on NA and experienced an increase in NA throughout the course of the study. Results did not find significant interactions between time and condition predicting PA, hope, or self-esteem. However, a marginally significant three-way interaction between time, condition, and BPD symptoms predicting hope revealed that repeated validation led to a significant increase in hope among individuals with low levels of BPD symptoms. Additionally, a significant three-way interaction between time, condition, and BPD symptoms predicting self-esteem revealed that repeated validation led to a significant increase in self-esteem among individuals with low and moderate levels of BPD symptoms.This study offers important advances to research on emotional reactivity in response to invalidation and validation by utilizing novel methodology and outcomes. The results suggest that while invalidation has an initial negative emotional impact, individuals may generally be able to adapt to invalidating statements, which ultimately have less emotional impact across time. Over time, individuals in both conditions end at relatively similar levels of emotional states. It also suggests that validating interactions with peers may have particularly beneficial impacts on increasing hope and self-esteem levels among individuals with low BPD features.