Prosocial versus instrumental motives for interpersonal emotion regulation

Abstract

Why do people try to influence the way others feel? Previous research offers two competing accounts of people’s motives for attempting to regulate others’ emotions. The instrumental account holds that people use interpersonal emotion regulation to benefit their own goal pursuit. Conversely, the prosocial account holds that people use interpersonal emotion regulation to benefit others’ goals. This article juxtaposes these accounts across two studies. Study 1 demonstrates that when given the chance to benefit themselves through their interpersonal emotion regulation, people choose to do so, even when this involves making a friend feel unpleasant. Yet when given the chance to benefit a friend through interpersonal emotion regulation, with no personal gains, people also choose to do so. Study 2 reveals no overall tendencies toward either motive when people can choose between benefitting themselves or a friend through their interpersonal emotion regulation. However, people’s motives can be reliably predicted by their values: individuals with high values of care and concern for others show a greater tendency to regulate a friend’s emotions prosocially and a lower tendency toward instrumentality.

Blurring the Dichotomy of Good and Evil: The Idiosyncratic Helping Strategies Associated with Unmitigated–Agentic and Unmitigated–Communal Personalities

“…Similar to Study 2, this concept was inspired by other research on interpersonal affect regulation (López-Pérez et al, 2017;Netzer et al, 2015). We incorporated an experimental paradigm similar to Niven, Henkel, and Hanratty (Niven, Henkel, & Hanratty, 2018; Study 1), which entailed assigning each dyad member the role of either 'chooser' or 'player', manipulating selfish versus altruistic motives for helping one's teammate via a raffle and having choosers select from various emotion-inducing stimuli intended for the player before the game. In our experiment, participants read that the chooser was responsible for selecting messages for the player to read with the goal of helping the player when she/he is struggling in the game; the player was responsible for playing the online game against the other team.…”

Half human, half machine – augmenting service employees with AI for interpersonal emotion regulation

“…Thus, goal attainment in our context was highly correlated with a (more) positive emotion feedback from the customer. We submit it to future research to disentangle the underlying process further in a context where people also have motive to engage in negative IER (Niven et al ., 2019).…”

Leader interpersonal emotion regulation motives, group leader–member exchange, and leader effectiveness in work groups

“…An individual can be motivated to regulate emotions in others to achieve their own goals or to facilitate others achieving their goals. In the former case, interpersonal emotion regulation is linked to egocentric motives, whereas in the latter case it is linked to prosocial motives (Niven, 2016; Niven, Henkel, et al, 2019). The distinction between egocentric and prosocial forms of motivation has a long history within psychology and the organizational sciences.…”