When feeling bad is expected to be good: emotion regulation and outcome expectancies in social conflicts

According to the instrumental approach to emotion regulation, people may want to experience even unpleasant emotions to attain instrumental benefits. Building on value-expectancy models of self-regulation, we tested whether people want to feel bad in certain contexts specifically because they expect such feelings to be useful to them. In two studies, participants were more likely to try to increase their anger before a negotiation when motivated to confront (vs. collaborate with) a negotiation partner. Participants motivated to confront (vs. collaborate with) their partner expected anger to be more useful to them, and this expectation in turn, led them to try to increase their anger before negotiating. The subsequent experience of anger, following random assignment to emotion inductions (Study 1) or engagement in self-selected emotion regulation activities (Study 2), led participants to be more successful at getting others to concede to their demands, demonstrating that emotional preferences have important pragmatic implications.     

High and low trait anger, and the recognition of anger problems

This study compared three groups of people: (a) high trait anger individuals who recognized personal anger problems (HR); (b) high trait anger individuals who did not recognize personal anger problems (HNR); and (c) low trait anger individuals not reporting personal anger problems (LNR). Compared to LNR participants, HR and HNR groups reported more anger-out (i.e., outward negative expression of anger such as arguing with others), anger-in (i.e., anger suppression and harboring grudges), greater desire to use and actual use of physically aggressive anger expression (e.g., pushing or shoving someone), and less anger control-in (i.e., emotionally focused strategies to lower anger such as relaxation) and anger control-out (i.e., behaviorally focused strategies such as being patient with others). HR individuals reported more trait anger (i.e., higher propensity to experience anger) and less anger control-out than the HNR group. Gender did not relate to the recognition of anger problems. Findings were discussed with regard to theory and clinical implications.     

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.     

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 nonconfrontational, 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.     

Motivated by guilt and low felt trust: The impact of negotiators' anger expressions on the implementation of negotiated agreements

Prior research has identified benefits from certain emotion tactics in negotiation, particularly expressing anger to achieve short‐term gains. We demonstrate that such tactics can be strategically problematic due to their impact on an actor's emotions and felt trust. Through five studies, we find that negotiators' use of anger tactics during a negotiation increased their feelings of guilt and reduced the extent to which they felt trusted by their counterpart following the negotiation. We found this guilt to be the result of their aggressive tone and how they treated their counterpart. The guilt and diminished felt trust in turn motivated negotiators to engage in greater cooperative behaviors during the deal implementation process that benefited their counterpart, even if doing so was costly to the negotiator. Our results demonstrate that negotiator guilt and felt trust resulting from anger tactics influence the dynamic relationship between negotiators and their counterparts. This in turn has strategic implications for negotiators, who attempt to mitigate these negative feelings during the crucial implementation phase of a negotiated agreement.     

The interpersonal effects of emotions in negotiations: a motivated information processing approach

Three experiments tested a motivated information processing account of the interpersonal effects of anger and happiness in negotiations. In Experiment 1, participants received information about the opponent's emotion (anger, happiness, or none) in a computer-mediated negotiation. As predicted, they conceded more to an angry opponent than to a happy one (controls falling in between), but only when they had a low (rather than a high) need for cognitive closure. Experiment 2 similarly showed that participants were only affected by the other's emotion under low rather than high time pressure, because time pressure reduced their degree of information processing. Finally, Experiment 3 showed that negotiators were only influenced by their opponent's emotion if they had low (rather than high) power. These results support the motivated information processing model by showing that negotiators are only affected by their opponent's emotions if they are motivated to consider them.     

Social Identity Orientation and the Generation of Compensatory Expectations: Schema Maintenance Through Compensation

This research explored the role that motives to confirm or maintain group stereotypes play in forming expectations about the future behaviors of ingroups. Participants who were high and low in social identity orientation (SIO) were presented with inconsistent information about the behavior of a member of their cohort group (i.e., college students). They then made predictions about the future behavior of either the deviant student (same target) or another student who was unrelated to the deviant (different target). High SIO participants, who should be especially motivated to confirm or maintain their group concept, generated compensatory expectations about the future behavior of a different group member who was unrelated to the deviant. Participants who were low in SIO did not demonstrate these effects. These results extend previous work (Seta & Seta, 1993) by demonstrating the moderating role of individuals' motivation to maintain group concepts. Results were also discussed in relation to Steele's research on self-affirmation (e.g., Steele & Lui, 1983) and our analysis of schema maintenance through compensation.     

Implementation intentions and the willful pursuit of prosocial goals in negotiations

Three studies examined whether the self-regulation strategy of forming implementation intentions (i.e., if-then plans) facilitates the attainment of prosocial goals when a limited resource is to be distributed between two parties who hold adverse cognitive orientations. In three experiments, pairs of negotiators were assigned prosocial goals that either had to be supplemented with plans (if-then plans, Gollwitzer, 1999) on how to act on these goals or not. Experiment 1 used a mixed-frames negotiation paradigm in which one negotiation partner operated on a gain-frame, the other on a loss-frame. When participants had the prosocial goal to find fair agreements and furnished it with a respective if-then plan, unfair agreements in favor of the loss-frame negotiator no longer occurred. Experiment 2 used a same-frame negotiation paradigm, where both negotiation partners had either a loss or a gain-frame. When loss-frame pairs had furnished their prosocial goals to cooperate with the negotiation partner with a respective if-then plan, reduced profits as compared to gain-frame pairs of negotiators were no longer observed. In addition, negotiators who had formed implementation intentions were more likely to use the integrative negotiation strategy of logrolling (i.e., making greater concessions on low rather than high priority issues). Experiment 3 used a computer-mediated negotiation task in order to analyze the effects of prosocial goals and respective implementation intentions on the course of the negotiation. Again, implementation intentions facilitated the pursuit of prosocial goals in the face of adversity (i.e., loss frames) by use of the integrative negotiation strategy of logrolling. The present research adds a self-regulation perspective to the research on negotiation by pointing out that the effects of negotiation goals can be enhanced by furnishing them with respective plans (i.e., implementation intentions).     

Recognition memory for source and occurrence: The importance of recollection

Previous recognition memory studies indicate that when both recollection and familiarity are expected to contribute to recognition performance (e.g., discriminating studied items from nonstudied items) the dual-process and the unequal-variance signal detection models provide comparable accounts of performance. When familiarity is not expected to be useful (e.g., when items from two equally familiar sources are discriminated between), the dual-process model provides a significantly better account of performance. In the present study, source recognition was tested under conditions in which familiarity could have been used to perform a list-discrimination task; participants were required to discriminate between strong studied items, weak studied items, and new items. The dual-process model provided a better account of performance than did the unequal-variance model. Moreover, the results indicated that the unequal-variance assumption in a single-process signal detection model was not a valid substitution for recollection and that recollection was used to make recognition judgments even when assessments of familiarity were useful.     

Shame and Guilt—Do They Really Differ in Their Focus of Evaluation? Wanting to Change the Self and Behavior in Response to Ingroup Immorality

Shame and guilt are often theorized to differ on a self versus behavior focus. However, we propose that this is not true when taking a group perspective. In our field study, 196 communal participants were confronted with historical ingroup immorality. Results showed that participants who were old enough to have understood what happened in that time-period felt more guilt and shame than did those who were too young. Partly due to their ingroup anger, shame motivated an intention to change the ingroup self and behavior. In contrast, partly due to personal anger, guilt motivated an intention to change personal self and behavior. This suggests that the distinction between shame and guilt are not as clear-cut as previous research have assumed.     

When does anger evoke self‐interest and fairness motives? The moderating effects of perceived responsibility for needs

Research has repeatedly demonstrated that anger evokes both self‐interest and fairness motives, but it is unclear what factors determine the evocation of these motives. We examined the idea that the type of relationship, indexed by the perceived responsibility for a partner's needs, moderates the effect of anger on self‐interest and fairness motives by constructing the following hypotheses: Participants will be motivated to protect their self‐interests when they feel anger toward an other who they perceive has the responsibility for needs, while this will not be the case when they feel anger toward an other who they do not perceive has a responsibility for needs (Hypothesis 1), and participants will be motivated to restore fairness regardless of whether the target of anger has a responsibility for needs or not (Hypothesis 2). The Japanese participants in this study rated their anger experiences in terms of the intensity of angry feelings, the perception of responsibility of the other for their own needs, the closeness of the relationship prior to the experience of anger, and the motives that were evoked. Regression analysis supported both hypotheses, implying that concerns related to self‐interest in close relationships reflect the desire for the maintenance of these relationships.     

Implicit transfer of spatial structure in visuomotor sequence learning

Implicit learning and transfer in sequence learning are essential in daily life. Here, we investigated the implicit transfer of visuomotor sequences following a spatial transformation. In the two experiments, participants used trial and error to learn a sequence consisting of several button presses, known as the m × n task (Hikosaka et al., 1995). After this learning session, participants learned another sequence in which the button configuration was spatially transformed in one of the following ways: mirrored, rotated, and random arrangement. Our results showed that even when participants were unaware of the transformation rules, accuracy of transfer session in the mirrored and rotated groups was higher than that in the random group (i.e., implicit transfer occurred). Both those who noticed the transformation rules and those who did not (i.e., explicit and implicit transfer instances, respectively) showed faster performance in the mirrored sequences than in the rotated sequences. Taken together, the present results suggest that people can use their implicit visuomotor knowledge to spatially transform sequences and that implicit transfers are modulated by a transformation cost, similar to that in explicit transfer.     

Intuition,affect, and personality: unconscious coherence judgments and self-regulation of negative affect

According to personality systems interaction theory, a negative mood was expected to reduce access to extended semantic networks and to reduce performance on intuitive judgments of coherence for participants who have an impaired ability to down-regulate negative affect (i.e., state-oriented participants). Consistent with expectations, state-oriented participants reporting higher levels of perseverating negative mood had a reduced discrimination between coherent and incoherent standard word triples (Study 1) and individually derived word triples describing persons (Study 2). Participants who are able to down-regulate negative affect (i.e., action-oriented participants) did not show this tendency. In addition, Study 2 revealed a dissociation between state orientation and Neuroticism that is discussed in terms of a functional difference between the two constructs.     

Intrinsic Motivation,Organizational Justice,and Creativity

For employees to generate creative ideas that are not only original, but also useful to their company, they must interact with their workplace environment to determine organizational needs. Therefore, it is important to consider aspects of the individual as well as their environment when studying creativity. Intrinsic motivation, a predictor of individual level creativity, is associated with feelings of enjoyment and interest in the task at hand. To the extent that tasks are nested in an environment, intrinsically motivated individuals may perceive their environment more favorably than individuals who are not interested in the task. Specifically, such individuals may view the rewards (i.e., distributive justice), decision-making procedures (i.e., procedural justice), and their interpersonal treatment (i.e., interpersonal justice) in their work environment as more fair, due to the positive affect associated with intrinsic motivation. This study examines the relationships between intrinsic motivation, perceptions of organizational fairness, and creativity. Participants (n = 133) worked on a task in a laboratory setting and completed measures of intrinsic motivation and organizational justice. Findings were supportive that intrinsically motivated participants viewed their environment as fairer than participants that were uninterested in the task. Consequently, distributive and interpersonal justice were shown to significantly mediate the relationship between intrinsic motivation and creativity. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.     

Managing one's social identity: Successful and unsuccessful identity management

This work explores the motivational dynamics of social identity management. Following social identity theory, we hypothesized that a threat to a positive social identity elicits specific negative emotions (i.e., outgroup‐directed anger) and motivates identity management. Successful identity management restores a positive social identity and decreases outgroup‐directed anger. However, when a successful identity management is blocked (e.g., because of limited cognitive resources), identity management will be unsuccessful and outgroup‐directed anger will remain at a higher level. This effect of unsuccessful identity management on outgroup‐directed anger should be particularly strong for group members who highly value their group (i.e., high group‐based self‐esteem). A negative comparison outcome is discrepant with these group members' positive view of the ingroup, and therefore, unsuccessful identity management should especially elicit negative emotions (i.e., anger) towards the threatening outgroup. Two studies tested these predictions. Study 1 (N = 110) showed that participants' outgroup‐directed anger increased when threatened under cognitive load. Study 2 (N = 99) demonstrated that this was particularly true for participants high in group‐based self‐esteem. The results' implications for research on the motivational processes underlying social identity management are discussed. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Motivated to confront: How experiencing anger affects anchoring bias

Prior research has asserted that emotions affect anchoring bias in decision making through the emotion's certainty appraisal or through the emotion's action tendencies, but these prior studies investigate the role of each component—appraisal or action tendency—without accounting for potential effects of the other one. The current research investigates whether anger exerts a significant effect on anchoring bias by activating a desire to confront a potential anchor. Importantly, the studies compare the effect of anger versus disgust, emotions that differ in their action tendency but are similar in their certainty appraisal. In Study 1, participants completed an emotion induction task and then a negotiation task where the first offer from the negotiation partner served as a potential anchor. Anger led to more deviation from the anchor compared with disgust or neutral feelings. Subsequent studies provide evidence that the angry participants are less anchored when the anchor value comes from a more confrontable source (someone else vs. themselves in Study 2 and an out‐group member vs. an in‐group member in Study 3).     

Autonomous Self-Control is Less Depleting

Autonomously motivated self-control may be less depleting than extrinsically motivated self-control. Participants were asked to not eat cookies and their motivation orientation for resisting that temptation was assessed. Their self-control performance was assessed immediately before and after fighting the temptation. As compared to their baseline performance, participants who avoided eating the cookies for more autonomous reasons performed better at the second measure relative to participants who did not eat for more extrinsic reasons. Mood, arousal, and demographic factors were not related to self-control performance and feelings of autonomy. Overall, it appears that feeling compelled to exert self-control may deplete more strength than having more freedom when exerting self-control. The results may increase our understanding of how self-control strength and feelings of autonomy interact.     

Does disseminating (mis)information restore social connection during a global pandemic?

The COVID-19 pandemic impeded social interaction, negatively affecting well-being worldwide. To slow virus spread, practices were enacted to minimize face-to-face contact, leading to increased social disconnection. As people turned increasingly to online environments (e.g., social media) to fulfill needs for inclusion and belonging, misinformation regarding COVID-19 simultaneously ran rampant. The purpose of the current study was to examine whether impeded social inclusion may have contributed to the spread of misinformation. We recruited a sample of adult social media users in the United States (N = 431) and randomly assigned them to be either included, ostracized (i.e., ignored), or rejected (i.e., to receive explicitly negative attention). Participants subsequently rated their willingness to share COVID-19 claims via social media (in fact, all claims were false). Participants learned that sharing some claims would likely lead to high expected engagement from others on social media (e.g., “likes”), whereas some claims would likely lead to little expected engagement. While information sharing was low in our sample, participants were more willing to share claims that they believed would lead to higher levels of engagement—consistent with the idea that sharing information is motivated not only by the desire to educate others but also to elicit social connection. However, this behavioral intention was no more common among participants who had been momentarily ostracized or rejected online than among participants who had been included. Future research should continue to explore the link between social exclusion and the motivation to disseminate (mis)information beyond a pandemic-related context.     

Should people pursue feelings that feel good or feelings that do good? Emotional preferences and well-being

Is it adaptive to seek pleasant emotions and avoid unpleasant emotions all the time or seek pleasant and unpleasant emotions at the right time? Participants reported on their preferences for anger and happiness in general and in contexts in which they might be useful or not (i.e., confrontations and collaborations, respectively). People who generally wanted to feel more happiness and less anger experienced greater well-being. However, when emotional preferences were examined in context, people who wanted to feel more anger or more happiness when they were useful, and people who wanted to feel less of those emotions when they were not useful, experienced greater well-being. Such patterns could not be explained by differences in the perceived usefulness of emotions, intelligence, perceived regulatory skills, emotional acceptance, social desirability, or general emotional preferences. These findings demonstrate that people who want to feel unpleasant emotions when they are useful may be happier overall. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

Attentional biases for negative interpersonal stimuli in clinical depression

An information-processing paradigm was used to examine attentional biases in clinically depressed participants, participants with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), and nonpsychiatric control participants for faces expressing sadness, anger, and happiness. Faces were presented for 1000 ms, at which point depressed participants had directed their attention selectively to depression-relevant (i.e., sad) faces. This attentional bias was specific to the emotion of sadness; the depressed participants did not exhibit attentional biases to the angry or happy faces. This bias was also specific to depression; at 1000 ms, participants with GAD were not attending selectively to sad, happy, or anxiety-relevant (i.e., angry) faces. Implications of these findings for both the cognitive and the interpersonal functioning of depressed individuals are discussed and directions for future research are advanced.