Maya Tamir

What Do People Want to Feel and Why? Pleasure and Utility in Emotion Regulation

It is typically assumed that people always want to feel good. Recent evidence, however, demonstrates that people want to feel unpleasant emotions, such as anger or fear, when these emotions promote the attainment of their long-term goals. If emotions are regulated for instrumental reasons, people should want to feel pleasant emotions when immediate benefits outweigh future benefits, but when future benefits outweigh immediate benefits, people may prefer to feel useful emotions, even if they are unpleasant. In this article, I describe an instrumental account of emotion regulation, review empirical evidence relevant to it, and discuss its implications for promoting adaptive emotional experiences.

The social costs of emotional suppression: A prospective study of the transition to college.

There is growing interest in understanding how emotion regulation affects adaptation. The present study examined expressive suppression (which involves inhibiting the overt expression of emotion) and how it affects a critical domain of adaptation, social functioning. This investigation focused on the transition to college, a time that presents a variety of emotional and social challenges. Analyses focused on 2 components of suppression: a stable component, representing individual differences expressed both before and after the transition, and a dynamic component, representing variance specific to the new college context. Both components of suppression predicted lower social support, less closeness to others, and lower social satisfaction. These findings were robustly corroborated across weekly experience reports, self-reports, and peer reports and are consistent with a theoretical framework that defines emotion regulation as a dynamic process shaped by both stable person factors and environmental demands.

A Dark Side of Happiness? How, When, and Why Happiness Is Not Always Good

Happiness is generally considered a source of good outcomes. Research has highlighted the ways in which happiness facilitates the pursuit of important goals, contributes to vital social bonds, broadens people’s scope of attention, and increases well-being and psychological health. However, is happiness always a good thing? This review suggests that the pursuit and experience of happiness might sometimes lead to negative outcomes. We focus on four questions regarding this purported “dark side” of happiness. First, is there a wrong degree of happiness? Second, is there a wrong time for happiness? Third, are there wrong ways to pursue happiness? Fourth, are there wrong types of happiness? Cumulatively, these lines of research suggest that although happiness is often highly beneficial, it may not be beneficial at every level, in every context, for every reason, and in every variety.

Hedonic and Instrumental Motives in Anger Regulation

What motivates individuals to regulate their emotions? One answer, which has been highlighted in emotion-regulation research, is that individuals are motivated by short-term hedonic goals (e.g., the motivation to feel pleasure). Another answer, however, is that individuals are motivated by instrumental goals (e.g., the motivation to perform certain behaviors). We suggest that both answers have merit. To demonstrate the role instrumental goals may play in emotion regulation, we pitted short-term hedonic motives and instrumental motives against each other, by testing whether individuals were motivated to experience a potentially useful, albeit unpleasant, emotion. We found that (a) individuals preferred activities that would increase their level of anger (but not their level of excitement) when they were anticipating confrontational, but not nonconfrontational, tasks and that (b) anger improved performance in a confrontational, but not a non-confrontational, task. These findings support a functional view of emotion regulation, and demonstrate that in certain contexts, individuals may choose to experience emotions that are instrumental, despite short-term hedonic costs.

Implicit theories of emotion: affective and social outcomes across a major life transition.

The authors demonstrate that people differ systematically in their implicit theories of emotion: Some view emotions as fixed (entity theorists), whereas others view emotions as more malleable (incremental theorists). Using a longitudinal and multimethod design, the authors show that implicit theories of emotion, as distinct from intelligence, are linked to both emotional and social adjustment during the transition to college. Before entering college, individuals who held entity (vs. incremental) theories of emotion had lower emotion regulation self-efficacy and made less use of cognitive reappraisal (Part 1). Throughout their first academic term, entity theorists of emotion had less favorable emotion experiences and received decreasing social support from their new friends, as evidenced by weekly diaries (Part 2). By the end of freshman year, entity theorists of emotion had lower well-being, greater depressive symptoms, and lower social adjustment as indicated in both self- and peer-reports (Part 3). The emotional, but not the social, outcomes were partially mediated by individual differences in emotion regulation self-efficacy (Part 4). Together, these studies demonstrate that implicit theories of emotion can have important long-term implications for socioemotional functioning.

Don't Worry, Be Happy? Neuroticism, Trait-Consistent Affect Regulation, and Performance

People regulate their affect either to feel good or to achieve instrumental success. The present experiments show that when driven by performance goals, people can be motivated to experience unpleasant affect when it is trait-consistent, because of its instrumental benefits (e.g., M. Tamir & M. D. Robinson, 2004). In 4 studies, individuals high in neuroticism were more likely than those low in neuroticism to choose to increase their level of worry, as indicated by self-reported preferences (Study 1) and by behavioral choices in experimental settings (Studies 2-4). As predicted, such preferences were evident when expecting to perform demanding tasks but not when expecting an undemanding task (Study 2). Study 4 suggests that such preferences for short-term unpleasant affect may be beneficial to performance.

The Happy Spotlight: Positive Mood and Selective Attention to Rewarding Information

Positive mood states are thought to sensitize individuals to rewards in their environment, presumably in the service of approach-related decision making and behavior. From a selective attention standpoint, such mood-related effects should be associated with selective attention biases favoring rewarding stimuli. No prior results along these lines have been reported. Therefore, the authors conducted a systematic program of research designed to document such relations. Study 1 found that daily positive mood states were associated with attention to reward words in a spatial probe task. Studies 2-5 replicated this association in the context of mood manipulations. The latter studies also show that the effect generalizes across different mood manipulation procedures, is specific to positive mood states, and is particularly apparent in relation to rewarding (vs. non-rewarding) positive stimuli. The results extend our knowledge of mood-cognition relations and have important implications for understanding the social cognitive consequences of positive mood states.

Business or pleasure? Utilitarian versus hedonic considerations in emotion regulation.

It is widely accepted that emotions have utilitarian as well as hedonic consequences. Nevertheless, it is typically assumed that individuals regulate emotions to obtain hedonic, rather than utilitarian, benefits. In this study, the authors tested whether individuals represent the utility of pleasant and unpleasant emotions and whether they would be motivated to experience unpleasant emotions if they believed they could be useful. First, findings revealed that participants explicitly viewed approach emotions (e.g., excitement) as useful for obtaining rewards, but viewed avoidance emotions (e.g., worry) as useful for avoiding threats. Second, this pattern was replicated in implicit representations of emotional utility, which were dissociated from explicit ones. Third, implicit, but not explicit, representations of emotional utility predicted motives for emotion regulation. When anticipating a threatening task, participants who viewed emotions such as worry and fear as useful for avoiding threats preferred to engage in activities that were likely to increase worry and fear (vs. excitement) before the task. These findings demonstrate that utilitarian considerations play an important, if underappreciated, role in emotion regulation.

Neuroticism as mental noise: a relation between neuroticism and reaction time standard deviations.

Those higher in neuroticism are often more variable in their behavior and experience. On the basis of this observation, the authors hypothesized that the trait of neuroticism might be correlated with the variability of performance pertaining to relatively basic cognitive operations. Three studies involving 242 college undergraduates supported this prediction in that neuroticism correlated positively with the variability of performance across trials of reaction time tasks. These results link neuroticism to cognitive noise that intervenes between stimulus and response. Such noise has been associated with executive dysfunctions (e.g., frontal lobe injury) in previous research. The present findings are potentially useful for understanding why neuroticism often correlates with variations in the functionality of cognition and behavior.

Can Emotion Regulation Change Political Attitudes in Intractable Conflicts? From the Laboratory to the Field

We hypothesized that an adaptive form of emotion regulation—cognitive reappraisal—would decrease negative emotion and increase support for conflict-resolution policies. In Study 1, Israeli participants were invited to a laboratory session in which they were randomly assigned to either a cognitive-reappraisal condition or a control condition; they were then presented with anger-inducing information related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Participants in the reappraisal condition were more supportive of conciliatory policies and less supportive of aggressive policies compared with participants in the control condition. In Study 2, we replicated these findings in responses to a real political event (the recent Palestinian bid for United Nations recognition). When assessed 1 week after training, participants trained in cognitive reappraisal showed greater support for conciliatory policies and less support for aggressive policies toward Palestinians compared with participants in a control condition. These effects persisted when participants were reassessed 5 months after training, and at both time points, negative emotion mediated the effects of reappraisal.