Friend known in suffering, meaningless to live well alone: The effect of emotional consistency and self-focused attention on interpersonal emotion regulation from the perspective of dual interaction

Subjects: Psychology >> Developmental Psychology Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2024-03-28

Xuan Yuyang Wei Yingying Yao Yujia

Abstract： Sharing our positive feeling with friends or turning to them for help when we are sad is immensely common in daily life. The process by which an individual consciously regulates the emotions of others is called interpersonal emotion regulation. Differ from intrapersonal emotion regulation, interpersonal emotion regulation is influenced by the emotional state of both parties. This study aims to elucidate this influence on interpersonal emotion regulation, including interpersonal emotion regulation effect and strategy selection. Experiencing the same emotions helps to identify other’s emotion and help them control their emotions. If so, we can validate the mood-congruence effect in interpersonal emotion regulation and further explore the underlying mechanisms.
In this study, we used an adapted emotion selection paradigm. 51 pairs of best friends (experiencers and regulators) were randomly chosen from one university and filled out the Friendship Quality Questionnaire prior to the experiment. Each pair of best friends completed the experiment in two separate and quiet rooms. During the formal experiment, both of them were presented with different emotional events and their emotional state were recorded before and after the experiment of interpersonal emotion regulation. And then, the experiencers were asked to anticipate the strategy that the regulator may use. After that, the experiencers were first asked to share their emotional events or mood with the regulators and seek for help via WeChat. The regulators completed emotion regulation after receiving the help signals. The results showed the emotional consistency effect, that is, when the emotions of both sides(experiencers and regulators) were consistent, comparing with the regulation effects when the emotions were inconsistent, both the interpersonal regulation effect of experiencers and the self-regulation effect of regulators were better. Meanwhile when the emotions were inconsistent, negative emotions were preferentially regulated whoever in that emotion state. In addition, only in interpersonal regulation of negative emotions, the strategy matching degree is affected by the emotional state of the regulators. Experiencers experienced better interpersonal regulation in negative emotional states than in positive emotional states.
Based on the finding in Study 1, we speculate that the emotional consistency effect in interpersonal emotion regulation may partly originate from the preferential processing of negative emotions. By sorting through the previous literature, we thought that self-regulation by the regulators may led to the allocation of cognitive resources. Therefore, in Experiment 2 we set up an emotional congruence situation to verify our hypothesis. We randomly recruited 88 friend pairs from one university and divided them into three groups to participate in the experiment, including control group, self-focused attention group , friend-focused attention group. The procedure is similar to Experiment 1. And the difference is that in Experiment 2, the regulators were asked to adjust their attention tendencies to manipulate the cognitive resources allocated to interpersonal emotion regulation, and both of experiencers and regulators were presented with same emotional events. The results revealed that only in negative emotions state, the self-focused attention group has worse interpersonal emotion regulation effect and lower strategy matching degree than those of the friend-focused group.
These suggest that: (1) In interpersonal interaction, the effect of regulating the negative emotions of others is better than that of regulating the positive emotions. (2) Emotional consistency effect exists in interpersonal emotion regulation. That is, the effect of interpersonal emotion regulation is better when both of experiencers and regulators are in the same emotional state. When the emotional states are inconsistent, the regulators preferentially regulates the negative emotions whoever in that emotion state. (3) Only when interpersonal regulating negative emotions occurs, the allocation of cognitive resources caused by attention focusing on friend can effectively improve the strategy selection and regulation effect.

Peer Review Status:Awaiting Review

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