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While most people want to feel happy, valuing happiness can paradoxically make people unhappy. We propose that such costs may extend to interpersonal contexts, given that valuing happiness may shape how people (i.e., regulators) manage others' (i.e., targets') emotions (i.e., extrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation). While valuing happiness could motivate regulators to reduce targets' distress using effective forms of emotion regulation, it may also push them to be intolerant toward targets' distress and, in turn, predict worse target well-being. The current investigation examines how two approaches to happiness (i.e., happiness aspiring and happiness concern) predict how regulators manage their children's and romantic partners' distress-two fundamental close relationship types that allow us to address the robustness of our findings. We obtained longitudinal reports across a year from socioculturally diverse regulators (
Zhao et al. (Thu,) studied this question.