Appraisal of Emotions in Media Use: Toward a Process Model of Meta-Emotion and Emotion Regulation

Abstract

Over the past 20 years, research on meta-emotion and related concepts such as meta-mood and need for affect has become fruitful and prominent across a variety of disciplines, including media psychology. This paper reviews the literature on meta-emotion and considers problems regarding the definition and operationalization of this construct. We propose a process model of meta-emotion and emotion regulation to integrate and extend existing work. Drawing on appraisal theories of emotion, we understand meta-emotion as a process that monitors and appraises emotions and recruits affective responses toward them, which results in a motivation to maintain and approach emotions, or to control and avoid them. This meta-emotion process plays an important role in media users' selection or rejection of specific media offerings and their invitation to experience emotion. We discuss how this framework may integrate previously unrelated findings on the role of emotions in guiding selective media use and conclude with directions for further research.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors wish to thank Robin Nabi and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

Notes

1. Source: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Inaugural Address, March 4, 1933, in S. Rosenman, (Ed.) (1938, pp. 11–16).

2. Further appraisal criteria like certainty (that the event has occurred or will occur) and causal agency (who or what is responsible for producing the event) are sometimes considered as concerns on their own right, and sometimes as “subchecks” of the controllability appraisal (cf., Scherer, 2001). For the sake of simplicity, they will not be considered in detail here.

3. Wirth & Schramm (2007) proposed to interpret the Acceptability dimension of the State Meta-Mood Scale as a pleasantness appraisal of emotions, Typicality as a (reverse scored) novelty appraisal, and Influence as a controllability appraisal. The items of the Acceptance subscale (e.g., “I shouldn't feel this way.” and “I'm not ashamed of my mood.”) might alternatively be interpreted as an appraisal of normative adequacy. Interpretation of the Influence subscale as a controllability appraisal of emotions is not entirely unproblematic as well because the items (e.g., “It [the mood] has altered my outlook.” and “It's changed how I think.”) refer to the influence of moods on the person's thinking rather than to the person's influence on his or her mood.