Knowing when to seek anger: Psychological health and context-sensitive emotional preferences

Abstract

According to hedonic approaches to psychological health, healthy individuals should pursue pleasant and avoid unpleasant emotions. According to instrumental approaches, however, healthy individuals should pursue useful and avoid harmful emotions, whether pleasant or unpleasant. We sought to reconcile these approaches by distinguishing between preferences for emotions that are aggregated across contexts and preferences for emotions within specific contexts. Across five days, we assessed daily confrontational and collaborative demands and daily preferences for anger and happiness. Somewhat consistent with hedonic approaches, when averaging across contexts, psychologically healthier individuals wanted to feel less anger, but not more happiness. Somewhat consistent with instrumental approaches, when examined within contexts, psychologically healthier individuals wanted to feel angrier in more confrontational contexts, and some wanted to feel happier in more collaborative contexts. Thus, although healthier individuals are motivated to avoid unpleasant emotions over time, they are more motivated to experience them when they are potentially useful.

Keywords:

• Psychological health
• Depression
• Emotional flexibility
• Emotion regulation

Notes

¹ Additional data that were collected as part of the larger study were unrelated to the questions examined in the current research project. For example, this included information on emotion regulation strategies (Davis et al., 2014; Shallcross, Ford, Floerke, & Mauss, 2013; Troy, Shallcross, Davis, & Mauss; 2013; Troy, Shallcross, & Mauss, 2013), physiological indices (Hopp, Shallcross, Ford, Troy, Wilhelm, & Mauss, 2013; Kogan et al., 2014; Kogan, Gruber, Shallcross, Ford, & Mauss, 2013), emotional variability (Gruber, Kogan, Quoidbach, & Mauss, 2013), sleep quality (Mauss, Troy, & LeBourgeois, 2013) and automatic emotion regulation (Hopp, Troy, & Mauss, 2011). We report any exclusions that were made, as well as all manipulations and measures that are relevant to this investigation. As this was part of a larger study, the sample size was not based on an a priori determination of effect size.

² We included another measure of depression, which is the Diagnostic Inventory for Depression (DID; Zimmerman, Sheeran, & Young, 2004), and all effects were replicated.

³ We removed an item about suicidality due to Institutional Review Board concerns.

⁴ We tested whether there were significant differences between participants who identified themselves as having previously been diagnosed with depression and those who did not by running the HLM analyses separately on each group. We found no significant differences between the groups in any of the analyses.