Emotion Regulation of Others and Self

In the past week, I have been collecting diary data from a handful of participants on current perceived mood, affective events and their desired mood states. One striking commonality between the participants’ emotional regulation behaviours was apparent before any official data analysis had begun. Each participant had expressed surprise that we had bothered to include negative emotional regulation strategies in the proposed EROS scale (along the lines of I have intentionally tried to make myself feel worse) because they thought that they were the only person who ever did that.

It’s unlikely that through a complete fluke I have picked out the only people that would ever behave this way and more probable that the false uniqueness effect is at work. People can believe that their otherwise normal thoughts or activities are atypical of the population. For example, my brother believed that he was the only one to enjoy cheese and a popular brand of yeast extract together in a sandwich until national commercials appeared featuring Paddington Bear enjoying the same sandwich filling.

Returning back to the point, the same conversation with each of the participants left me wondering just how common it is to choose to make oneself feel worse, or if in a negative mood to not actively try to improve it. The literature is somewhat sparse on the matter and in places it appears to be a default assumption that people would aim to feel good as much as possible. For example, Larsen’s (2000) highly influential paper on a model of emotional regulation has a section titled Assuming People Want to Feel Good. Although more recently, Tamir (2005) highlights that individuals may increase negative affect to be instrumentally beneficial (such as an individual high in neuroticism increasing their level of worry in order to improve performance in cognitively demanding tasks). Further to this, Wood et al. (2009) indicate that while those with high self-esteem have a strong motivation to improve a sad mood, those with lower self-esteem may choose not to improve a sad mood.

As we’re online at the moment, we can use the Internet to give us a very rough and in-no-way-scientific estimate to the question of how prevalent is wanting to negatively regulate one’s mood? The current trend of blogs and social network site use gives us a massive resource of freely offered data that only requires a little creativity in order to use. For example, Kramer (2010) uses a word recognition program to trawl through millions of Facebook status updates to provide a metric of current happiness (our happiness spikes on national holidays and was at a low ebb when Heath Ledger died). The art project We Feel Fine has been running since 2005 to catalogue a blogger’s emotions whenever they use the trigger words “I feel…”. It’s not perfect, as at the time of writing twenty people feel umbrella but it is a fun way to be a nosy neighbour without the hassle of twitching the curtains.

To generate some data of our own, I will be using a simple Google search for phrases (with quotes so they become exact phrase searches). At time of writing, the phrase “I want to feel happy” finds 1.2 million pages. In contrast, the phrase “I don’t want to feel happy” returns 760 thousand pages. These figures change substantially if we slightly tweak the phrase. For example, “I want to be happy” returns 10 times as many pages: 12.5M overall. What’s more, “I don’t want to be happy” gives us a massive increase from 760K to a total of 32.5M sites.

Using the same approach we get a similar, but diminished set of results for feeling sad: “I want to feel sad”, 77K pages; “I want to be sad”, 650K pages. “I don’t want to feel sad”, 61K pages; “I don’t want to be sad” 1.34M pages.

So what does this all tell us? For a start, there is a sizable community out there who don’t want to improve their mood. Secondly, while people may not want to be happy, a much smaller proportion actually want to be sad; perhaps they are aiming for a more neutral emotional state, such as feeling calm. Finally, and in quite a surprising result, people prefer to talk about being happy or sad rather than feeling happy or sad.

The use of the term being strikes me as a much more permanent state than feeling. In my mind, being implies a central trait of a person, perhaps viewed alongside personality “I am an extraverted, happy person” rather than transitive experiences that you feel “I feel hungry and sad”. There are possible implications for emotional regulation here. If people do view emotions as relatively stable states, they may believe it is difficult to regulate their emotions and so be unlikely to try and change their feelings, possibly reinforcing that belief.

Equally plausible, is that people may be actually discussing being happy as a general state of well-being rather than a momentary experience (Daniel Kahneman describes why the difference between these is important in this TED talk). Although, searching for “I (don’t) want to be/feel….” gives similar differences between being and feeling for most emotions, so perhaps it’s not about well-being.

While participants expressed concern if self-worsening emotional regulation strategies were in any way atypical, they did not for strategies used to worsen other’s emotions. Perhaps the more common nature of worsening others emotion is reflected in the ‘data’. If we widen the search to look at changing others’ emotions, we see that in contrast to the first example, there are fewer sites for negative emotion regulation than positive. More generally though, we see the same set of patterns as before.

Across the board, there are more results for searches using be rather than feel. Also, we again have this contrast between people not wanting others to be happy, while still not specifically wishing them to be sad. On top of this, the gender’s target seems to have little effect on the number of sites, with the exception of the search “I want her to be sad”, which brings up 70k pages compared to “I want him to be sad”, which brings up just 5 pages.

Of course, there are a couple of big problems with using a Google search as a data set because of the lack of any intelligent data sifting. Most obviously, we have irrelevant sites, like the millions dedicated to song lyrics, included. Even if we did find a relevant site, the context of the phrase used is important. The phrase “I don’t want to be happy” would be logged here as a desire for a negative state; however, the phrase could only be a part of a more positive statement: “I don’t want to be happy with a low paying job, which is why I’m enrolling in college.”

In sum, this has been a fun little exercise, which possibly tells you more about my definition of fun than anything about emotions. There’s definitely a distinction in numbers between people who regard emotions as things you are and those who view emotions as things you feel. This may indicate that people’s perceptions and beliefs about emotions are worth considering when looking at emotion regulation. The exercise also demonstrates that my participants really were not alone in their choice of emotional regulation strategies; possibly my participants thought they were unique because it’s not a commonly discussed topic. Finally, it’s a very brief glimpse of all the data freely volunteered just waiting to be examined.

Dave Cameron - University of Sheffield.

This EROS blog post has been an amalgamation of several posts from my personal site socialemotions.blogspot.com
Google searches seem to be varying due to time and computer (or browser?) used - in a previous incarnation of the Google search we were getting results as high as 806M sites for “I don’t want to be happy.” The ratios between the pages seem fairly consistent regardless of the actual number of sites returned.

References:
Larsen, R.J (2000) Toward a Science of Mood Regulation, Psychological Inquiry 11(3), 129-141
Tamir, M. (2005) Don’t worry, be happy? Neuroticism, trait-consistent affect regulation, and performance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 89(3), 449-461.
Wood, J.V., Heimpel, S.A., Manwell, L.A., Whittington, E.J. (2009) This Mood is Familiar and I Don’t Deserve to Feel Better Anyway: Mechanisms Underlying Self-Esteem Differences in Motivation to Repair Sad Moods, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 96(2), 363-380