Instrumental Motivation Of Interpersonal Emotion Regulation In Cooperation And Competition Situations

Interpersonal emotion regulation,a prerequisite for good social interaction,may affect emotional states and re lationship quality of regulator and target.Motivations play an important role in determining the direction and outcome of emotion regulation.In order to achieve the goal,the individual not only up-regulate or down-regulate the intensity or duration of e motional response to meet the specific motivation,but also are motivated to regulate others' emotional states.The motivations of interpersonal emotion regulation include hedonic and instrumental motivation.In daily life,people often choose hedonic motivation to regulate emotion.While in the confrontation activities,the choice is often instrumental motivation.Previous studies have explored the motivations of emotional regulation,but little research has paid close attention to the motivations of interpersonal emotion regulation,especially instrumental motivation.Interpersonal emotion regulation occurs in a variety of contexts.And in different situations,the motivations people regulate others' emotion may be different.Whether people increase the motivation of emotion regulation depends on perceiving the utility of certain emotion in a successful confrontation.When thinking that angry can promote the achievement of goals,people are motivated to up-regulate angry.Then,familiarity of regulator and target is one of the factors that affect the motivations of interpersonal emotion regulation.In interpersonal emotion regulation,compared with strangers,people feel friends more familiar,have more emotional communication with friends,and are more like ly to choose hedonic motivation for friends.Conversely,people may be more choice of instrumental motivation when interacting with strangers.Monetary rewards have a direct effect on promoting the motivations,and individual performance improves with the increase of the amount of reward.In addition,monetary rewards may also be an important factor in influencing motivations of interpersonal emotion regulation.In this research,three experiments were designed to explore instrumental motivation of interpersonal emotion regulation.By playing an aggressive game,Experiment 1 examined whether people would be driven by the instrumental motivation to increase the unpleasant emotion(angry)in partners(rather than rivals),and then probed into the moderate effect of perceived utility of anger.Experiment 2 replaced partners and rivals with familiar friends,and then explored whether the instrumental motivation of interpersonal emotion regulation still existed.Experiment 3 took into account the monetary rewards,randomly assigned participants to the highand low-reward group,and examined whether the different amount of reward would affect the conclusion of experiment 1.The results showed that:(1)In interpersonal emotion regulation,participants were motivated to increase angry in their partners(rather than rivals)in order to achieve the gain goal.But this result was not affected by familiarity.Even if the partner was a familiar friend,the result was the same.(2)The amount of reward affected instrumental motivation of interpersonal emotion regulation.Participants in the high-reward group tried to increase angry in their partner(rather than rivals)for benefit,while the performance of low-reward group had no significant difference in cooperation and competition situations.(3)Perceived utility of angry moderated the relation between situations and the degree of emotional preferences.The more effective participants perceived that angry was,the angrier they were motivated to induce partners(rather tha n rivals)to feel.This study verifies the instrumental motivation of interpersonal emotion regulation,which is of great significance to expand the research perspective of interpersonal emotion regulation,to understand the mechanism of motivations of interpersonal emotion regulation,and to guide clinical application.