Motivational Intensity in Emotion Regulation.

Changing how we feel can be adaptive, but it is also difficult and may require effort. There is research on what people want to achieve in emotion regulation (motivational content), but there is little research on how intensely people pursue what they want to achieve (motivational intensity). We tested the role of motivational intensity in emotion regulation, by assessing (Studies 1-2, s = 160 and 157) and manipulating (Study 3, = 250) it in daily life.

Better relationships do not always feel better: Social relationships interact in predicting negative emotions in early adolescence.

How negatively young adolescents feel is central to their well-being. Intuitively, better social relationships should be linked to less negative emotions. This study tested this assumption, using a sample of over 80,000 young adolescents from 32 countries (ages 10-12).

Knowledge About the Source of Emotion Predicts Emotion-Regulation Attempts, Strategies, and Perceived Emotion-Regulation Success.

People's ability to regulate emotions is crucial to healthy emotional functioning. One overlooked aspect in emotion-regulation research is that knowledge about the source of emotions can vary across situations and individuals, which could impact people's ability to regulate emotion. Using ( = 396; 7 days; 5,466 observations), we measured adults' degree of knowledge about the source of their negative emotions.

Desired sadness, happiness, fear and calmness in depression: The potential roles of valence and arousal.

Prior research has shown that clinically depressed individuals are somewhat more motivated to feel sadness and less motivated to feel happiness than nondepressed individuals are. However, what underlies these patterns is not yet clear, as people may be motivated to experience positive (vs. negative) valence, high (vs.

Understanding positive emotion deficits in depression: From emotion preferences to emotion regulation.

Depression is characterized by increased levels of negative affect and decreased levels of positive affect. Prior research shows that individual differences in emotion regulation play an important role in understanding sustained negative affect within the disorder; yet, much less is known about the regulation of positive emotion in depression. The current paper utilizes emotion regulation models that synthesizes multiple emotion processes, including what people want to feel (emotion preferences) and the ways in which people typically respond to emotion (habitual use of emotion regulation strategies), to increase our understanding of positive emotion in depression.

One Size Does Not Fit All: Tailoring Cognitive Reappraisal to Different Emotions.

Emotion regulation strategies have been typically studied independently of the specific emotions people try to change by using them. However, to the extent that negative emotions are inherently different from one another, people may choose different means to change them. Focusing on fear and sadness, we first mapped emotion-related content to theoretically matched reappraisal tactics.

Do the ends dictate the means in emotion regulation?

Although selecting emotion regulation strategies constitutes means to achieve emotion goals (i.e., desired emotional states), strategy selection and goals have been studied independently.

Sad as a Matter of Choice? Emotion-Regulation Goals in Depression.

Research on deficits in emotion regulation has devoted considerable attention to emotion-regulation strategies. We propose that deficits in emotion regulation may also be related to emotion-regulation goals. We tested this possibility by assessing the direction in which depressed people chose to regulate their emotions (i.