Yes I can: Expected success promotes actual success in emotion regulation

ABSTRACT

People who expect to be successful in regulating their emotions tend to experience less frequent negative emotions and are less likely to suffer from depression. It is not clear, however, whether beliefs about the likelihood of success in emotion regulation can shape actual emotion regulation success. To test this possibility, we manipulated participants' beliefs about the likelihood of success in emotion regulation and assessed their subsequent ability to regulate their emotions during a negative emotion induction. We found that participants who were led to expect emotion regulation to be more successful were subsequently more successful in regulating their emotional responses, compared to participants in the control condition. Our findings demonstrate that expected success can contribute to actual success in emotion regulation.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotion
• emotion regulation
• beliefs
• efficacy
• expectancies

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Joy Hackenbracht for her assistance with data collection and Moïra Mikolajczak for her help with this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹We also measured social desirability (Crowne & Marlowe, 1960). However, we do not report analyses with social desirability scores, because due to technical difficulties, scores on this measure were recorded for only some of the participants.

²Sample size was determined following a power analysis, using the effect size in Manucia et al. (1984).

³Emotion items and ratings scales were not identical in the pre-test and in the experiment, because we sought to include a broader range of emotion items in the study than the limited range that was included in the pre-test. We also used a scale that has been commonly used when measuring emotional experience in emotion regulation studies (e.g. Richards & Gross, 2000).

⁴None of our hypothesised effects were qualified by gender.

⁵To ensure that participants on Mturk pay careful attention to the instructions, we added an attention check to this survey (Oppenheimer, Meyvis, & Davidenko, 2009). Specifically, approximately half way through the survey, participants were asked to mark a specific response option. Five participants failed this attention check and were excluded from the analysis.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a Marie Curie Reintegration Grant [IRG 265588] to Maya Tamir.