Emphasizing other-focused over self-focused goals elicits more high-engagement strategies and less expressive suppression when regulating others’ emotions

When regulating someone’s emotions, your goal might be to make them feel better (other-focused regulation goal) or to make yourself feel better (self-focused regulation goal; e.g., reducing their distress to relieve your own negative feelings). These contrasting goals may drive differences in regulation strategies. The current pre-registered study ( N = 55) uses a repeated-measures within-subjects design to compare strategies chosen when participants were instructed to achieve pro-hedonic goals that were self-focused versus other-focused. Eight regulation strategies varied in how much engagement with the other person was required, from low-engagement (expressive suppression, downward social comparison) to moderate-engagement (humor, distraction, direct action) to high-engagement (valuing, cognitive reframing, receptive listening). Strategies were also categorized by process-model stage as response-focused (expressive suppression, receptive listening) versus antecedent-focused (the others). Pre-registered hypotheses were supported, as the other-focused goal condition produced significantly more valuing, reframing and listening but significantly less suppression than the self-focused condition. Exploratory analyses showed significant main effects of engagement (across goals, people used more high-engagement than low-engagement strategies), goal condition (across strategies, people engaged in greater regulation for the other-focused than self-focused goal condition) and their interaction (greater use of high-engagement than low-engagement strategies was stronger in the other- than self-focused goal condition). Our findings suggest both engagement level and process model stage are possible drivers of which strategies are chosen to make someone else versus yourself feel better. Future research could examine instrumental as well as hedonic goals, consider more objective assessments, and consider wellbeing benefits other-focused regulation goals may have.