Emotion regulation strategies, the „attempts to influence which emotions one has, when one has them, and how one experiences or expresses these emotions” (Gross, 1998) are of lasting interest for current psychology. Successful regulation of affective states has been linked to many positive outcomes such as well-being and relationship satisfaction and is a protective factor against psychological disorders. Current research highlights how specific emotion regulation strategies aren't just generally more functional than others, but that flexibly choosing between strategies based on situational demands might produce the best outcomes. An important distinction is the choice between directing attention away from the stimulus at an early attentional selection stage of the emotion regulation process (distraction) versus changing the interpretation of the situation at late semantic meaning stages (reappraisal). Because these options have different cost-benefit-tradeoffs in terms of cognitive resources, it has been demonstrated that distraction is chosen more often in reaction to high-intensity situations and reappraisal in low-intensity situations (Sheppes & Levin, 2013; Matthews et al., 2021). In this study, we will test regulation choice patterns and their effectiveness on regulating negative emotional states in different social contexts. Participants are asked to choose between 4 strategies after receiving information about the intensity of a subsequent stimulus: (1) reappraisal without social support (intrapersonal reappraisal), (2) distraction without social support (intrapersonal distraction), (3) reappraisal with social support (interpersonal reappraisal), and (4) distraction with social support (interpersonal distraction). Social support is provided by a sentence that could be used to either distract or reinterpret the subsequent emotional stimulus. In a control condition, participants are asked to maintain their emotional responses and try not to alter or control them (maintain). The study will consist of two independent experiments. Experiment 1 will allow for direct comparison of different strategies due to equally sized experimental conditions (forced choice), whereas experiment 2 may provide more external validity (free choice).