Adult attachment and interpersonal emotion regulation motives in daily life.

Abstract

Interpersonal goals and adult attachment have implications for how people interact with others as well as for emotion experience and regulation. Literature on intrapersonal emotional processes has typically not examined motivations underlying people's engagement with others’ emotions and its connections to individual differences related to close relationships such as attachment. This study analyzed the relationships between interpersonal emotion regulation motives, perceived social interaction outcomes, and attachment. Undergraduates (N = 211) reported their trait attachment. Experience sampling was used to examine the reasons why they wanted to regulate others’ emotions during daily interactions and perceived changes in their own well-being and relationship quality with the target of regulation. Attachment anxiety was associated with more self-focused prohedonic motives and impression management motives, while attachment avoidance predicted less perceived increases in emotional and relational well-being after interactions. People who tended to report more (self- and other-focused) prohedonic and less impression management motives in daily life perceived more positive changes in their emotional well-being and people who tended to report higher emotional similarity motives perceived more positive changes in their relational well-being after interactions People also perceived more positive emotional and relational interaction outcomes at times when they held more (self- and other-focused) prohedonic, impression management, or relationship maintenance motives and less self-focused performance and relationship distancing motives. Overall, these findings suggest that attachment anxiety may guide why people engage with other people’s emotions and these extrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation motives may play a role in socioemotional outcomes of daily interactions.

Empathy is associated with interpersonal emotion regulation goals in everyday life.

“…At the same time, we observed more single effects of empathy facets on IER goals on the state compared to the trait level. Most reported IER motives were hedonic, which aligns with previous research (English et al, 2017; Springstein et al, 2023).…”

Does interpersonal emotion regulation effort pay off?

“…Thus, factoring in these automatic processes may give us a clearer understanding of what is driving the outcomes of intrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation. Second, because affect-worsening regulation was extremely rare both in existing literature (e.g., Kalokerinos et al, 2017; Springstein et al, 2023) and in our data, we chose to focus on effort invested in affect-improving regulation, where people have goals to either increase/maintain positive emotions and/or decrease negative emotions. Our findings therefore cannot be generalized to affect-worsening regulation, where people have goals to either increase/maintain negative emotions and/or decrease positive emotions.…”

“…While people may engage in regulation with goals to either improve or worsen how they and others feel (e.g., Niven et al, 2009; Riediger et al, 2009), we focused specifically on affect-improving regulation. This decision was because affect-improving regulation tends to be more common in daily life (e.g., Kalokerinos et al, 2017; Springstein et al, 2023), and is more consistently linked to regulation outcomes (Riediger et al, 2009). To get at effort more directly, we explicitly asked participants to report how much effort they put into their regulation attempts.…”

“…They suggest people feel better when their interaction partner is responsive and gives solicited (vs. unsolicited) cognitive support. Researchers have also looked at factors at the individual levels, such as motives of the regulator (Niven et al, 2019a), and the target (Liu et al, 2021; Springstein et al, 2023). These relational and individual factors can all play a role in shaping regulation outcomes.…”

Preprint: Interpersonal emotion regulation in young adults with low and high psychosis proneness: A diary study

“…More specifically, we compared a group with attenuated positive and a group with attenuated negative symptoms to young adults with low psychosis proneness. Since both the frequency and efficacy of IER strategies have been demonstrated to be also modulated by day-to-day contextual factors, such as relationship closeness or emotions to be regulated (Paul et al, 2023;Springstein et al, 2022), we used daily diaries to assess IER strategy use and positive and negative symptoms over one week. We hypothesized that young adults with attenuated negative symptoms would use fewer IER strategies and that young adults with attenuated positive symptoms would use more IER strategies in their daily lives than people with low psychosis proneness.…”