Emotional exchanges across work and home shape individuals’ experiences in both domains. Yet research has largely focused on how people are affected by the support they receive, leaving open whether providing emotional support to others generates benefits that extend across these contexts. Integrating spillover and interpersonal emotion regulation frameworks, we conducted two daily diary studies to examine whether providing emotion regulation to coworkers and romantic partners promotes positive outcomes across work and home. In Study 1, employed adults in committed relationships (N = 120) completed twice-daily surveys over 10 workdays, reporting on regulation behaviours provided to others, perceived regulation effectiveness, emotional exhaustion, and affect at work and home. Providing emotion regulation was associated with greater perceived regulation effectiveness, which predicted lower emotional exhaustion within the same context and spillover benefits in the other context. Study 2 extended this design to couples (N = 61 dyads), replicating the within-person actor effects and showing that the rewarding experience of providing emotion regulation mediated both work-to-home and home-to-work spillover effects. Study 2 also identified a crossover effect, such that men’s work exhaustion predicted women’s home exhaustion, highlighting relational pathways through which emotional experiences transfer between partners. Together, these findings suggest that providing emotion regulation functions as a resource-generating process, offering a novel interpersonal pathway through which everyday emotional support translates into adaptive outcomes across work and family domains, with implications for designing workplace and couple-based interventions.

Authors:
Hester Xiao (The University of Sydney)
Sarah Cameron (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)
Réka RENDES (University of Pécs)
Terise Broodryk (Victoria University of Wellington)
Ciara Kelly (Sheffield University Management School, University of Sheffield)
Karen Niven (Sheffield University Management School, University of Sheffield)
Kit Double (The University of Sydney)
Rebecca Pinkus (The University of Sydney)
Carolyn MacCann (The University of Sydney)