To do it (to) yourself or not? Dilemmas of emotion regulation and home improvement
Posted on Oct 02, 2009 by Karen Niven
I have recently bought my first home, and I love it! That’s not to say it’s perfect. In fact, the bathroom and kitchen both need completely ripping out and starting again, and there are countless more small jobs that need doing before the house is ‘finished’.
For most of these jobs, I face a choice: Do it myself or pay someone else to do it? To make these decisions, I have relied on a simple cost-benefit analysis, taking into account the benefits to the finish of the job versus the financial costs of paying a professional, and the financial benefits versus the effort costs of doing a job myself.
And how does this relate to EROS? Well, with emotion regulation, there are also two ways of getting the job done…
The first way of regulating emotions is try to change your own feelings, a processes termed intrapersonal (or intrinsic) emotion regulation. Indeed, researchers in the field of emotion regulation have long-recognised that people deliberately try to change their own emotions, and that they can draw on over hundreds of strategies to do this (Parkinson & Totterdell, 1999).
And of course there are many benefits to performing intrapersonal emotion regulation. Use the right strategies to regulate your feelings and you may be in line for such rewards as positive emotions and well-being, improved social functioning and better performance in sports and work (e.g., Gross & John, 2003).
However, there are also costs involved in regulating your own emotions. As a form of self-control, intrapersonal emotion regulation draws on our mental resources and, if these are not replenished, it may result in emotional exhaustion and poorer performance in subsequent self-control tasks (Muraven & Baumeister, 2000). In our latest research, the Work Psychology and Experimental Social Psychology EROS groups, both based in Sheffield, are collaborating to explore whether intrapersonal emotion regulation also leads to the depletion of physiological resources, by examining changes in blood glucose and heart rate variability in a lab-based study.
The second way of regulating emotions is to try to change another person’s feelings. Research interest in this process of interpersonal (or extrinsic) emotion regulation has been relatively recent, but it is now acknowledged that people deliberately try to influence the feelings of their friends, family members, partners, co-workers and customers. And, like intrapersonal emotion regulation, we know that people may also draw on hundreds of distinct strategies to change others’ emotions (Niven, Totterdell & Holman, 2009).
Again, there seem to be benefits to interpersonal emotion regulation. A recent series of studies conducted by the Work Psychology EROS group found that strategies used to improve other people’s emotions were associated with positive well-being for both the intended target of regulation and the person using the strategies (the ‘agent’). Moreover, these same strategies were associated with positive changes in the quality of agent-target relationships.
As for costs, we know that regulating own emotions is an effortful process, so it is likely that effort is also expended during the regulation of other people’s feelings. Although the studies mentioned above indicated that interpersonal emotion regulation may have short-term positive effects, over time the effort expended through regulating others’ emotions may prove depleting. In our future studies, the Work Psychology EROS group will be investigating the costs of regulating others’ emotions in more depth, focusing on the use of interpersonal emotion regulation in work settings including call centres.
So can we recommend which course of emotion regulation to take? Unfortunately, not yet. Until we have longer-term data concerning the effects of interpersonal emotion regulation, a fully-informed cost-benefit analysis must wait. But if you are wondering what to do when it comes to tiling your bathroom, then I say DIY all the way!
References:
Gross, J. J., & John, O. P. (2003). Individual differences in two emotion regulation processes: Implications for affect, relationships, and well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85, 348-362.
Muraven, M., & Baumeister, R. F. (2000). Self-regulation and depletion of limited resources: Does self-control resemble a muscle? Psychological Bulletin, 126, 247-259.
Niven, K., Totterdell, P., & Holman, D. (2009). A classification of controlled interpersonal affect regulation strategies. Emotion, 9, 498-509.
Parkinson, B., & Totterdell, P. (1999). Classifying affect regulation strategies. Cognition and Emotion, 13, 277-303.
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