Daily and event-level dynamics of self-concept clarity and emotion regulation during the college transition: a 21-day diary study.

This 21-day diary study tracked 134 first-year college students (2,750 observations) to examine how self-concept clarity (SCC) and emotion regulation strategies (ERS) dynamically interact across daily and event timescales during the transition to college. Using multilevel vector autoregressive models, we distinguished between event-level and day-level processes. At the daily level, SCC was concurrently associated with greater acceptance and lower rumination but did not predict next-day ERS use, whereas distraction and a greater number of strategies predicted higher next-day SCC. At the event level, momentary decreases in SCC were associated with increased concurrent use of both adaptive and maladaptive strategies, as well as overall greater regulatory engagement, but showed limited next-day carryover effects. These findings suggest that SCC functions primarily as a product of well-regulated emotional regulation at the daily level and as a dynamic signal at the event level, highlighting the importance of temporal differentiation in understanding the interplay between self-concept and emotion regulation.