Interpersonal Emotion Research Articles

Are we softly constructing more inclusive males? An examination of men’s interpersonal emotion work for children and partners

This article investigates gendered differences in emotion work in contemporary Australian society by examining family-oriented emotion work. We examine the ways parents in heterosexual relationships perform emotion work for their children and their partners through qualitative, semi-structured interviews, focusing on changing experiences and shifting structuration processes around gendered norms and emotional inequality. We found some evidence of continuing gender essentialism and hegemonic-masculine behaviours. Female respondents were more likely to perform regular emotion work and adopt empathic attitudes towards their children, as well as manage their own emotions concerning their partners. Many respondents believed that these gender differences were ‘innate and natural’. However, more progressive inclusive-masculine behaviours were evident in men managing their own emotions, seeking more emotional engagement, and performing more caring than authoritative emotion work for their children. It was also evident in men and women both performing numerous forms of care and interpersonal emotion work for each other (that is, their partners). This study points to the emergence of more fluid structuration and ‘softer’ forms of gender social constructionism, in place of the ‘harder’ constructionism and gender essentialism predominant in prior studies.

Regulating and emerging: Extrinsic affect improvement and the emergence of leadership.

Emotions are powerful tools through which formal leaders influence their followers, whether by overt emotional displays or deliberate attempts to regulate their own and others' emotions. This raises the following question: Can the strategic effort to regulate others' emotions help team members emerge as informal leaders? This work demonstrates that extrinsic emotion regulation-a goal-directed action aimed at regulating team members' emotions-can enable individuals to rise to informal leadership positions. We hypothesize that team members who improve group emotions emerge as informal leaders. This was tested in two studies. In Study 1 (a lab study on 25 ad hoc groups; n = 100), individuals recognized for improving group affect were chosen as informal leaders. In Study 2 (a field study of 43 student groups that worked together for 6 weeks; n = 141), individuals who self-reported engaging in extrinsic affect-improving were recognized by their peers as fostering positive group affect and subsequently were chosen as the informal leaders of the group. Notably, our findings show that the impact of extrinsic affect-improving was above and beyond that of intrinsic affect-improving. These results underscore the pivotal role of interpersonal emotion regulation, specifically extrinsic affect-improving, in the emergence of informal leadership and highlight its unique contribution to leadership dynamics within teams. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Empathic accuracy and interpersonal emotion regulation in close relationships.

Interpersonal emotion regulation commonly occurs in the context of close relationships. The present study examined whether accurately knowing the emotions that one's romantic partner would feel in a given situation was associated with the effectiveness of interpersonal emotion regulation attempts. One partner from 92 romantic dyads (N = 184) was randomly assigned to the role of the target, and the other was assigned to the role of the regulator. Each participant read four vignettes depicting emotion-inducing scenarios. Targets rated the emotions they would feel in each situation, whereas regulators reported how they thought their partner would feel in each situation. Targets were then asked to describe what their partner could say to help them feel good or better in each situation, using an open-ended response format. The regulators were asked to describe what they would say to their partners to help them feel good or better in each situation. Accuracy was defined as the mean difference in ratings between the regulator's estimates of their partner's emotions and their actual emotion ratings across the scenarios. Effectiveness of regulation was defined as the mean score of similarity between regulator's open-ended responses and target's open-ended responses as rated by independent coders. The results showed that empathic accuracy significantly predicted regulation effectiveness. We also found that individual differences in regulators' emotional clarity scores predicted empathic accuracy. This study sheds light on the importance of accurately perceiving a partner's emotions for effective regulation in close relationships. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Supplemental Material for Empathic Accuracy and Interpersonal Emotion Regulation in Close Relationships

Supplemental Material for Empathic Accuracy and Interpersonal Emotion Regulation in Close Relationships

Principal-Teachers Agreement on Teachers’ Interpersonal Emotion Regulation: Relations with Principals’ Transformational Leadership, Teaching Staff Positive Collective Emotions, and Teaching Staff Organizational Commitment

Principal-Teachers Agreement on Teachers’ Interpersonal Emotion Regulation: Relations with Principals’ Transformational Leadership, Teaching Staff Positive Collective Emotions, and Teaching Staff Organizational Commitment

The Association Between Autistic Traits and Depression in College Students: The Mediating Roles of Interpersonal Emotion Regulation and Social Self-Efficacy

The Association Between Autistic Traits and Depression in College Students: The Mediating Roles of Interpersonal Emotion Regulation and Social Self-Efficacy

Interpersonal emotion regulation and symptom dimensions of psychosis proneness in young adults

This study investigated the relative associations of psychosis proneness symptom domains with habitual interpersonal emotion regulation (IER) use in a sample of young adults (n = 420, age 18–29). Multiple regression models showed that attenuated negative symptoms were related to using less, while attenuated positive symptoms and depression were related to using more IER. These findings suggest symptom-specific IER patterns across different symptom dimensions of psychosis proneness.

Experienced emotions, emotion regulation strategies, and regulation depletion in collective team collapse and performance recovery situations

The collective collapse of a team’s performance is typically triggered by a critical event, such as performance failure or scoring of the opponent, evoking unhelpful emotions and their transfer between team members. These changes in emotional states also affect athletes’ cognitive processes and behaviors, maintaining the team collapse and prohibiting the team from recovering its performance. However, not every critical event and the emotions that accompany it evoke a team collapse, which is why athletes’ emotion regulation may play a key role in determining the performance outcome of a critical event for the team. To investigate this hypothesis, we conducted a retrospective-online survey study with 69 team sport athletes, assessing the emotion regulation strategies they applied in past team collapse vs. performance recovery situations, and how these strategies impacted them. We used quantitative measures to assess experienced emotions, individual and interpersonal emotion regulation, and depleting effects of emotion regulation in both situations and an open-ended qualitative question to assess interpersonal emotion regulation strategies in more detail. Athletes reported more unhelpful emotions and the increased use of affect-worsening and performance hindering individual and interpersonal emotion regulation strategies in the team collapse compared to the performance recovery situation. Athletes further indicated higher levels of effort regulating emotions and higher depletion levels in the team collapse situation. Our results highlight the importance of individual and interpersonal emotion regulation strategies in team collapse situations and indicate the use of more effective and less depleting strategies for sport teams to mitigate against a team collapse. Lay summary: This correlational study explored experienced emotions, individual and interpersonal emotion regulation, and its depleting effects in team collapse situations vs. situations where teams recovered their performance after a critical event. Athletes used inefficient, affect-worsening strategies, experienced more unhelpful emotions, and felt more depleted in team collapse vs. performance recovery situations.

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).

Supplemental Material for The Interpersonal Risks of Valuing Happiness: Links to Interpersonal Emotion Regulation and Close Others’ Mental Health

Supplemental Material for The Interpersonal Risks of Valuing Happiness: Links to Interpersonal Emotion Regulation and Close Others’ Mental Health

Intrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation strategy use and effectiveness across adulthood: The role of interaction partner age.

One way older adults may be able to maintain emotional well-being despite declining in cognitive ability is through leveraging social resources for intrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation. Additionally, given their increased life experience, older adults might also be particularly well-suited to regulate the emotions of others. To examine age difference in use and effectiveness of intrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation, community adults (N = 290, aged 25-85 years) were prompted 6×/day for 10 days to report their emotional experience, use of intrinsic emotion regulation strategies (including capitalization, social sharing, co-reappraisal, and reminiscing), and interaction partner age. Older age was associated with being less likely to engage in social sharing of negative emotions, and this effect was stable when controlling for negative emotion experience. Otherwise, there were no age differences in how often or how effectively people use intrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation. In terms of interaction partner age, older partner age was only associated with greater likelihood of using co-reappraisal and higher reports of negative emotion after social sharing. In summary, there was no strong evidence for the idea that interpersonal emotion regulation becomes more (or less) common or effective with age. However, though people may be less likely to share negative emotions and be seen as less effective partners for sharing these emotions later in life, older adults are preferable social partners for co-reappraisal potentially due to their life experience. Future work should explore motivational (i.e., attitudes toward negative emotions) and cultural (i.e., perceptions of roles and emotional abilities) mechanisms. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Interpersonal emotion regulation and depressive symptoms in parent-adolescent dyads: A daily-diary investigation.

Deficient parental extrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation (IER, how people regulate others' emotions) is a known risk factor for adolescent depression. Although IER and depression development are transactional, dyadic processes, previous work has almost exclusively focused on how parental IER is associated with adolescent depression. The association between parental IER and adolescent depression, and the associations between adolescent IER and adolescent and parental depression have received little attention. Moreover, most studies have focused on the regulation of negative but not positive affect. We address these gaps by examining associations between parent and adolescent IER and depressive symptoms using the actor-partner interdependence model framework. For 28 days, 112 parent-adolescent dyads (12-18-year-old adolescents) completed a dyadic daily diary, reporting their own depressive symptoms and IER strategies employed in response to dyad members' positive and negative affect. Our results, based on 5,442 data points, show that the use of positive- and negative-affect-worsening IER is associated with more depression in the regulator (be it parent or adolescent). Surprisingly, parents' use of more negative-affect-improving IER was associated with higher levels of their own and adolescents' depression. Finally, adolescents' use of positive-affect-improving IER was associated with their own decreased depression. Overall, parents (vs. adolescents) used more negative- and positive-affect-improving extrinsic IER, whereas adolescents used more positive-affect-worsening extrinsic IER. Our results highlight the importance of using dyadic designs in studying depression and IER, as well as the need to consider who is regulating, the valence of the affect regulated, and the type of strategy used. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Will you boost my joy or dampen it? Cultural differences in hedonic interpersonal emotion regulation in romantic relationships.

A central tenet guiding contemporary research on emotions is that people are fundamentally motivated to feel good and avoid feeling bad. This principle translates from intrapersonal to extrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation; people not only strive to achieve the hedonic goal of managing their own emotions, but they also help others reach the same goal-the process called hedonic interpersonal emotion regulation (hedonic IER). Here, we challenge the centrality of this principle in romantic relationships by testing a hypothesis that, compared with European Americans, Asians use hedonic IER less and benefit less from their partners' use of this strategy. Findings across three studies (total N = 2,540) supported this hypothesis. First, European Americans used hedonic IER more than Asians both in positive and negative situations, and, moreover, this cultural difference was mediated by dialectical beliefs about emotions (Study 1). Second, compared with Chinese, European Americans anticipated greater relationship satisfaction in response to their partners' hedonic IER attempts in both positive and negative situations, and this effect was again mediated by dialectical emotion beliefs (Study 2). Third, compared with Asian couples, European American couples perceived that their partners used hedonic IER more in positive situations. Moreover, when European Americans perceived that their partners used hedonic IER more, they showed greater vagal withdrawal during a positive discussion (i.e., physiological reactivity linked to enhanced social sensitivity and engagement), while Asians did not show this association (Study 3). These findings highlight the critical role of sociocultural contexts in shaping IER and its relational consequences. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Divergence of children’s friendships and intrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation: Factoring in extrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation strategy use.

Divergence of children’s friendships and intrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation: Factoring in extrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation strategy use.

Supplemental Material for Interpersonal Emotion Regulation and Depressive Symptoms in Parent–Adolescent Dyads: A Daily-Diary Investigation

Supplemental Material for Interpersonal Emotion Regulation and Depressive Symptoms in Parent–Adolescent Dyads: A Daily-Diary Investigation

Supplemental Material for A Multisample Investigation of Links Between Individual Differences in Emotion Dysregulation and Perceived Helpfulness of Interpersonal Emotion Regulation Interactions

Supplemental Material for A Multisample Investigation of Links Between Individual Differences in Emotion Dysregulation and Perceived Helpfulness of Interpersonal Emotion Regulation Interactions

Assessing Affective Dimensions of the Interpersonal Circumplex: Development and Validation of the Interpersonal Emotion Inventory

Interpersonal emotions are feelings distinctively associated with real or imagined interpersonal situations. We propose that interpersonal emotions can be organized within the same circumplex used by contemporary integrative interpersonal theory to organize other aspects of interpersonal functioning. Our research explores the affective dimensions underpinning the interpersonal circumplex (IPC) and maps distinct emotional dispositions using coordinates for agentic and communal affect. Our aim is to provide a better differentiated and more comprehensive taxonomy of interpersonal emotions consistent with the IPC framework. In an initial development study (N = 1223 undergraduates) we used circumplex and psychometric criteria to create a 64-item Interpersonal Emotion Inventory (IEI), a novel self-report measure of interpersonal emotions reflecting each IPC octant. We then tested the structural properties and utility of the IEI in a preregistered validation study (N = 278 community participants). Across both studies, the IEI scales exhibited good fit to a two-dimensional circular model. The IEI demonstrated robust convergent, discriminant, and incremental validity in relation to measures of interpersonal values and problems, positive and negative affect, adult attachment, self-conscious emotions, self-esteem, and facets of narcissism. By complementing existing measures of affect and interpersonal phenomena, the IEI should prove useful in both research and clinical contexts.

An Integrative Framework for Capturing Emotion and Emotion Regulation in Daily Life.

When studying emotion and emotion regulation, typical approaches focus on intrapersonal processes. Although this emphasis clarifies what transpires within a person, it does not capture that much of emotional experience and regulation occurs between people. In this commentary, we highlight how the Cognitive-Affective Processing System (CAPS) approach-originally developed by Mischel and Shoda and extended to dyadic interactions by Zayas, Shoda, and Ayduk-can provide a unifying framework for understanding the complexity of everyday affective experiences. We discuss how this framework can be fruitfully applied to the study of emotion and emotion regulation broadly, and particularly to interpersonal emotion regulation, by considering both the mediating psychological processes within individuals, as well as the behavioral processes that transpire between individuals. To illustrate these points, we discuss some of the thought-provoking work in the special double issue on the Future of Affective Science edited by Shiota et al. (2023), and we offer forward-thinking suggestions and propose future research directions informed by the CAPS approach. By employing the CAPS framework, we can better capture the complexity of everyday affective experiences and synthesize the growing body of research in affective science.

Interpersonal Emotion Regulation in Young Adults With Low and High Psychosis Proneness: A Diary Study

Abstract Purpose Emotion regulation is a complex process that often involves the presence of others, also known as interpersonal emotion regulation (IER). However, little is known about how psychotic symptoms relate to IER. We investigated whether young adults with elevated psychosis proneness engage in IER less frequently and find it less helpful than those with low psychosis proneness. Methods Psychosis-prone young adults with attenuated negative (PP-NES, n = 37) and positive symptoms (PP-POS, n = 20) and a low psychosis-prone control group (CG, n = 52) were recruited based on a priori defined cut-offs for the Community Assessment of Psychic Experiences. Participants provided daily diaries over one week, reporting negative symptoms, paranoia, positive and negative affect, and the frequency and efficacy of IER strategies to upregulate positive and downregulate negative emotions. Results Multilevel models showed that PP-NES reported using IER less frequently and found it less effective compared to CG. PP-POS reported turning to others for advice in distressing situations more than the CG. These group differences were related to aberrant affect levels in PP-NES. Across groups, participants used IER less on days on which they reported more negative symptoms and used it more on days on which they reported more paranoia. Conclusions These findings suggest symptom-specific aberrations in everyday IER in psychosis-prone young adults. Moreover, from day to day, young adults (psychosis-prone or not) appear to adjust their use of IER depending on current social motivation and distress levels. Future research should investigate whether these aberrations are dysfunctional regarding social inclusion and symptom trajectories.

The critical mediating roles of the middle temporal gyrus and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex in the dynamic processing of interpersonal emotion regulation

Interpersonal emotion regulation (IER) is a crucial ability for effectively recovering from negative emotions through social interaction. It has been emphasized that the empathy network, cognitive control network, and affective generation network sustain the deployment of IER. However, the temporal dynamics of functional connectivity among these networks of IER remains unclear. This study utilized IER task-fMRI and sliding window approach to examine both the stationary and dynamic functional connectivity (dFC) of IER. Fifty-five healthy participants were recruited for the present study. Through clustering analysis, four distinct brain states were identified in dFC. State 1 demonstrated situation modification stage of IER, with strong connectivity between affective generation and visual networks. State 2 exhibited pronounced connectivity between empathy network and both cognitive control and affective generation networks, reflecting the empathy stage of IER. Next, a ‘top-down’ pattern is observed between the connectivity of cognitive control and affective generation networks during the cognitive control stage of state 3. The affective response modulation stage of state 4 mainly involved connections between empathy and affective generation networks. Specifically, the degree centrality of the left middle temporal gyrus (MTG) mediated the association between one's IER tendency and the regulatory effects in state 2. The betweenness centrality of the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC) mediated the association between one's IER efficiency and the regulatory effects in state 3. Altogether, these findings revealed that dynamic connectivity transitions among empathy, cognitive control, and affective generation networks, with the left VLPFC and MTG playing dominant roles, evident across the IER processing.