The interpersonal risks of valuing happiness: Links to interpersonal emotion regulation and close others' mental health.

While most people want to feel happy, valuing happiness can paradoxically make people unhappy. We propose that such costs may extend to interpersonal contexts, given that valuing happiness may shape how people (i.e., regulators) manage others' (i.e., targets') emotions (i.e., extrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation). While valuing happiness could motivate regulators to reduce targets' distress using effective forms of emotion regulation, it may also push them to be intolerant toward targets' distress and, in turn, predict worse target well-being. The current investigation examines how two approaches to happiness (i.e., happiness aspiring and happiness concern) predict how regulators manage their children's and romantic partners' distress-two fundamental close relationship types that allow us to address the robustness of our findings. We obtained longitudinal reports across a year from socioculturally diverse regulators (N = 279, including partially overlapping groups of 155 parents and 248 partnered individuals) and cross-sectional reports from partners. We found that people who aspired to be happy were more successful at using reappraisal and distraction to manage targets' emotions, while those who were concerned about happiness were less successful at accepting targets' emotions (i.e., confirmed by partners' reports). In turn, more successful use of reappraisal and distraction predicted better target well-being, and less successful acceptance of targets' emotions predicted poorer target well-being across the next 8 months. These findings underscore the importance of understanding individual differences that shape consequential forms of interpersonal emotion regulation, thereby illuminating who is most likely to help their loved ones and who may be putting them at risk. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Unpacking the pursuit of happiness: Being concerned about happiness but not aspiring to happiness is linked with negative meta-emotions and worse well-being.

Previous work suggests that sometimes the more people value happiness, the less happy they are. For whom and why is this the case? To answer these questions, we examined a model of happiness pursuit that disentangles two previously conflated individual differences related to valuing happiness. The first individual difference operates at the strength of the value itself and involves viewing happiness as a very important goal (i.e., aspiring to happiness). The second individual difference occurs later in the process of pursuing happiness and involves judging one's levels of happiness (i.e., concern about happiness). This model predicts that aspiring to happiness is relatively innocuous. Conversely, being concerned about happiness leads people to judge their happiness, thereby infusing negativity (i.e., negative meta-emotions) into potentially positive events, which, in turn, interferes with well-being. We tested these hypotheses using cross-sectional, daily-diary, and longitudinal methods in student and community samples, collected between 2009 and 2020, which are diverse in gender, ethnicity, age, and geographic location (Ntotal = 1,815). In Studies 1a and 1b, aspiring to happiness and concern about happiness represented distinct individual differences. In Study 2, concern about happiness (but not aspiring to happiness) was associated with lower well-being cross-sectionally and longitudinally. In Study 3, these links between concern about happiness and worse well-being were partially accounted for by experiencing greater negative meta-emotions during daily positive events. These findings suggest that highly valuing happiness is not inherently problematic; however, concern and judgment about one's happiness can undermine it. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Individual differences in social power: Links with beliefs about emotion and emotion regulation.

OBJECTIVE: People differ in how they regulate their emotions, and how they do so is guided by their beliefs about emotion. We propose that social power-one's perceived influence over others-relates to one's beliefs about emotion and to emotion regulation. More powerful people are characterized as authentic and uninhibited, which should translate to the belief that one should not have to control one's emotions and, in turn, less suppression and more acceptance. More powerful people are also characterized as self-efficacious and confident, which should translate to the belief that one can control one's emotions and, in turn, more reappraisal and acceptance. METHOD: Two preregistered studies using four samples (Ntotal  = 1286) tested these hypotheses using cross-sectional and longitudinal surveys as well as diaries. RESULTS: In Study 1, power related to beliefs about emotion and emotion regulation in hypothesized ways. Study 2 also largely supported the hypotheses: The belief that one should not have to control one's emotions accounted for the links between power and suppression and acceptance, whereas the belief that one can control one's emotions accounted for the link between power and reappraisal. CONCLUSION: Power and emotion regulation are interconnected, in part because of their links with beliefs about emotions.

Spontaneous suppression in dating couples: Social and physiological correlates of suppressing negative and positive emotions during negative and positive conversations.

Suppression (i.e., inhibiting one's emotional expression) has typically been associated with social and physiological costs. However, recent theorizing calls into question the inevitability of these costs. The present study takes a more nuanced approach and examines the social and physiological correlates of spontaneous (i.e., uninstructed) suppression when considering two potentially critical factors: the valence of the suppressed emotions (i.e., negative vs. positive) and the valence of the emotional context in which emotions are suppressed (i.e., negative conversation vs. positive conversation). Specifically, dating couples (N = 196 couples) completed both a negatively-valenced and a positively-valenced conversation in the laboratory while their autonomic-physiological responses were recorded. After each conversation, participants rated 1) the extent to which they had suppressed their negative and positive emotions, 2) the quality of the conversation, and 3) how connected they felt with their partner. We used Actor-Partner Interdependence Models to estimate actor effects (e.g., association of one's own suppression and one's own connectedness) and partner effects (e.g., association of one's partner's suppression and one's own connectedness). Suppression was associated with lower conversation quality and connectedness for the actors but largely not for the partners, regardless of the valence of the suppressed emotions and of the context, even when adjusting for felt emotion. Additionally, suppression was consistently not associated with physiological responses of actors or partners. Together, these findings suggest that, during emotional conversations with one's romantic partner, spontaneous (unlike instructed) suppression is associated with social but not physiological costs for the self but not one's partner.

"I feel you": Greater linkage between friends' physiological responses and emotional experience is associated with greater empathic accuracy.

How do people come to know others' feelings? One idea is that affective processes (e.g., physiological responses) play an important role, leading to the prediction that linkage between one's physiological responses and others' emotions relates to one's ability to know how others feel (i.e., empathic accuracy). Participants (N = 96, 48 female friend pairs) completed a stressful speech task and then provided continuous ratings of their own (as "targets") and their friend's (as "perceivers") emotional experience for the video-taped speeches. We measured physiology-physiology linkage (linkage between perceivers' and targets' physiology), physiology-experience linkage (linkage between perceivers' physiology and targets' experience), and empathic accuracy (linkage between perceivers' ratings of targets' experience and targets' ratings of their experience). Physiology-experience (but not physiology-physiology) linkage was associated with greater empathic accuracy even when controlling for key potential confounds (random linkage, targets' and perceivers' emotional reactivity, and relationship closeness). Results suggest that physiological responses play a role in empathic accuracy.