Instrumental Emotion Regulation Information

The instrumental approach to emotion regulation proposes that people prefer to experience certain emotions when they are useful for pursuing a specific goal. Furthermore, the balance between immediate and long term benefits are effected by the goal in pursuit. If the immediate benefits are greater than the long term benefits the emotional preference is more strongly determined by the pleasantness of the emotion. On the other hand, if the long term benefits are greater emotional preference is more strongly determined by the utility of the emotions. ^[1] When pursuing an instrumental goal, the individual seeks delayed gratification and is prepared to sacrifice immediate pleasure in order to enhance utility. ^[2] The idea is that people do not purely pursue emotions that feel good but use emotion regulation to prioritise the success of a goal. ^[3] Individual's look to regulate emotion to achieve related changes in cognition, physical response, behaviour or social outcomes. The instrumental element to emotional regulation suggests that emotions can dictate more than the way we feel and have utility in attaining certain goals.

Functionality and Context of Emotions

It has been suggested that the function of each emotion is to organise and motivate a certain group of behaviours. ^[4] An individual may seek to experience a certain emotion in order to trigger certain functionally responsive behaviours. For example, if anger’s functional use is to defend resources ^[5], this would motivate individuals to adopt this emotion when resource defence is the goal. An alternative view suggests that the consequences of emotions are dictated by factors such as cultural and social context. ^[6] If emotions are linked to characteristic functions, it is possible that when the function is matched to a congruent context the individual will benefit from the emotional experience. However, if the consequence of emotions is variable dependent on the individual and the context, a certain emotion’s utility may vary dependently. If certain behaviours are associated with specific emotions, ^[5] there should be a preference for experiencing emotions with a behavioural response appropriate to attaining a goal. Conversely, if emotion is not linked to specific behavioural responses, individual’s emotional experience would be varied depending on contextual features. Instrumental emotion regulation research tests the nature of emotional regulation by assessing the context, variation and utility of people’s emotional preferences.

Expectancy

Research suggests that people rely on what they expectancy to happen and there is a preference toward the stimuli that is expected to have utility. ^[7] The instrumental approach to emotion regulation proposes that the greater the motivation to achieve a goal and the higher the expectancy of an emotion promoting goal attainment, the more likely the individual is to want to experience that emotion. For example, to avoid threat the higher the expectancy that fear will promote effective avoidance, the more likely it is that people will want to experience fear. ^[1]

Often, expectancy operates unconsciously ^[8] so people may not always be aware of what determines their emotions. Tamir, Chiu, and Gross (2007) ^[9] studied the relationship between implicit (unconscious) expectancies of emotional utility and explicit ( conscious) emotional preferences. Implicit expectancy was measured by the participant’s completion of a computer task where associative strength between fear and utility in threat avoidance was indicated by response speed. Participants read a sentence stating a goal and visualized pursuing it. Then a word describing an emotion would flash on screen. A meaningless array of letters or a word was then displayed and they gave an indication as to whether or not this was a word. The words used in the third activity represented either high or low utility.  The authors predicted that those who expected fear to have utility in threat avoidance would respond more quickly to high utility words. The participants that confirmed this prediction had no explicit expectancy that fear would be of use for avoidance. However, in preparation for a threatening task, their preference for fear inducing activities was more likely. Findings suggest that people may be unaware of the determinants effecting their emotional preferences.

Research Areas

Social Interaction

Erber, Wegner, and Therriault (1996) ^[10] studied preferences in mood regulation before engaging in social interaction. They played either happy or sad music to participants before telling them that they would later be performing a task either on their own or with a stranger. They were then asked to specify if they wanted to read either positive or negative news stories. They found that participants who were expecting to complete a task alone would select the articles congruent with the music they had heard. Those who expected to work with a stranger wanted articles incongruent with the music in order to neutralise their mood. This suggests that occurrence of emotion regulation is determined by social context rather than agreeableness of the emotion itself. ^[11]

Confrontation

Tamir, Mitchell, and Gross (2008) ^[12] investigated if people preferred to feel angry in preparation to pursue a confrontational goal. The participants believed that memory and computer games was the focus of the study and that they would be remembering events or taking part in an unrelated task like listening to some music before playing a game. Emotional preferences were assessed from indications as to the music they preferred to listen to and the type of event they chose to remember before partaking in a game that was either confrontational or non-confrontational. Participants preferred activities that induced anger prior to a confrontational game and not the non-confrontational game. The experimenters further tested the utility of anger in confrontation by manipulating the emotional experience of the participants based on the type of music they were given to listen to before playing both confrontational and non-confrontational games. They found the participants who were angry had greater success in the confrontational games although still performing as well as the others in non-confrontational games. This suggests there is a preference toward anger when it is perceived as useful.

Negotiation

Tamir and Ford (2012) ^[13] investigated how people wanted to feel in interpersonal negotiations. Participants played the role of a landlord negotiating with a tenant (another participant) who had not paid their rent. They were given either a confrontational goal (immediately getting their money back), a collaboration goal (uphold a lasting relationship with their tenant) or no specific instruction. Next they chose a film clip to watch and a memory to recall before negotiation began. The findings showed that participants seeking collaborative goals were more inclined to choose activities inducing happiness and those with confrontational goals had a tendency to choose activities that made them angry. Anger had the highest utility in confrontation as there was a higher likelihood for the angry participants to convince the tenant to accept their demand than other participants. This suggests that even unpleasant emotions such as anger are preferable if they are useful in certain goal pursuits.

Threat Avoidance

Evolutionarily speaking, the function of fear is to facilitate the successful pursuit of threat avoidance goals. ^[5] Tamir and Ford (2009) ^[14] studied preferences toward experiencing fear in preparation for threat avoidance. Participants were given the choice to engage in a fear inducing activity prior to playing a computer game that had either avoidance or approach based goals. In line with their previous research, results supported the instrumental approach as there was a preference toward fear inducing activities in preparation for pursuing avoidance goals. As fear is a particularly unpleasant emotion the authors concluded that people can sometimes have a preference to aversive emotions if they result in attainment of instrumental goals.

Sport

Lane, Beedie, Devonport and Stanley (2011) ^[15] studied the relationship between athlete’s beliefs about their emotions, emotional regulation strategies and their emotional state prior to competing from an instrumental perspective. After obtaining information from 360 runners about each of these factors the authors found that 15% reported beliefs that strategies to increase anger or anxiety would assist performance while the other 85% believed that strategies to decrease the same emotions before competing were most beneficial. After further analysis the authors found that athletes who believe that feeling angry or anxious was good for performance reported higher levels of anger (not anxiety) before competing. These athletes were also found to use regulation strategies that increased unpleasant emotional states. The study suggests that for some athlete’s instrumental use of unpleasant emotions is believed to be related to increased performance but further research is required to understand this relationship.

Personality Differences

Typically, highly neurotic individuals are motivated to avoid threat. ^[16] When avoidance is the goal feeling fearful can be useful. ^[17] Thus, neurotics may want to feel fear and worry when preparing to avoid a threatening stimulus. Tamir (2005) ^[18] found that highly neurotic individuals had a higher likelihood of choosing to increase their worry prior to performing a threatening task. Findings showed that worry also improved their performance. Extroversion, however, are motivated to approach rewards. ^[19] Useful emotional states for successful approach include feelings of excitement or happiness. ^[17] Tamir (2009) ^[20] found that extroverted individuals were more likely to choose to partake in an activity that induced happiness when preparing for a task that required motivation than introverts.

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