Will you boost my joy or dampen it? Cultural differences in hedonic interpersonal emotion regulation in romantic relationships.

A central tenet guiding contemporary research on emotions is that people are fundamentally motivated to feel good and avoid feeling bad. This principle translates from intrapersonal to extrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation; people not only strive to achieve the hedonic goal of managing their own emotions, but they also help others reach the same goal-the process called hedonic interpersonal emotion regulation (hedonic IER). Here, we challenge the centrality of this principle in romantic relationships by testing a hypothesis that, compared with European Americans, Asians use hedonic IER less and benefit less from their partners' use of this strategy. Findings across three studies (total