Emotion Experience and Expression Goals Shape Emotion Regulation Strategy Choice

Abstract

Research has begun to investigate how goals for emotion experience—how people want to feel— influence the selection of emotion regulation strategies to achieve these goals. We make the case that it is not only how people want to feel that affects strategy selection, but also how they want to be seen to feel. Incorporating this expressive dimension distinguishes four unique emotion goals: (1) to experience and express emotion; (2) to experience but not express emotion; (3) to express but not experience emotion; and (4) to neither experience nor express emotion. In six experiments, we investigated whether these goals influenced choices between six common emotion regulation strategies. Ruminati..