Maya Tamir | Emotion and Self-Regulation Laboratory

What do people want to feel and why?
Pleasure and utility in emotion regulation.
Current Directions in Psychological Science, 18, 101-105.

It is often assumed that people always want to feel good. However, our work has demonstrated that this is not the case. At times people want to experience pleasant emotions, and at other times, they want to experience unpleasant emotions. According to an instrumental approach to emotion regulation, when immediate benefits outweigh future benefits, people should want to feel pleasant emotions. However, when future benefits outweigh immediate benefits, people may want to feel useful emotions, even if they are unpleasant (see Figure).

This framework leads to several predictions. First, people may want to feel differently at different times. More specifically, people may want to feel different emotions in situations that give rise to different goals. Research from our laboratory as well as others supports this prediction. For example, we showed that people show stronger preferences for anger when they expect to complete a task that requires aggression, compared to a task that does not. We also showed that people show stronger preferences for fear when they expect to complete a task that requires them to avoid threat, compared to one that requires them to approach rewards. In both cases, people expressed willingness to experience unpleasant emotions in context where these emotions can be useful.

Second, what people want to feel should be linked to their beliefs about the usefulness of emotions. In support of this prediction, we found that people who believed anger is useful for confrontation were more likely to try to increase their anger before a confrontational task, whereas people who believed fear is useful for confrontation were more likely to try to increase their fear. In another study, we demonstrated that when people want to confront another person they are motivated to feel anger to the extent that they expect anger to be useful. Beliefs about the usefulness of emotions were associated with what people wanted to feel, even when such beliefs were assessed outside of conscious awareness.

Hedonic and instrumental motives in anger regulation
Psychological Science, 19, 324-328.

If given the option, would you rather feel angry or excited? People typically prefer to feel emotions that are pleasant (e.g., excitement) and avoid those that are unpleasant (e.g., anger). The current research tested whether people prefer to experience emotions that are potentially useful, even when they are unpleasant to experience. In particular, we tested whether individuals are motivated to increase their level of anger when they expect to complete a task where anger might enhance performance. Participants were told that they will either play a violent or a non-violent computer game. They were then asked to rate the extent to which they would like to engage in different activities before playing the game. We found that participants preferred activities that were likely to make them angry (e.g., listening to anger-inducing music, recalling past events in which they were angry) when they expected to play a violent game. In contrast, participants preferred more pleasant activities when they expected to play a non-violent game.

Did anger influence performance on the computer game? To examine whether preferences to increase anger resulted in improved performance, participants were assigned at random to either an angry, neutral, or excited emotion induction and then played a violent and a non-violent computer game. As expected, angry participants performed better than others in the violent game, by successfully killing more enemies. However, angry participants did not perform better than others in the non-violent game, which involved serving customers. Such findings demonstrate that what people prefer to feel at any given moment may depend, in part, on what they might get out of it.

What do People Want to Feel in Negotiations?

This work is supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

This ongoing project examines whether and how people regulate their emotions in negotiations. Prior research has shown that anger can promote confrontation in negotiations, whereas happinses can promote collaboration. Therefore, we sought to test whether people would be motivated to regulate their emotions in order to successfully attain their goals in negotiations. We further sought to test whether such strategic emotion regulation carries pragmatic implications for negotiation outcomes.

Our results so far indicate that when people were motivated to confront (vs. collaborate with) a negotiation partner, they preferred to engage in activities that would increase their anger before the negotiation. Such preferences for anger were found only among participants who expected anger to contribute to better negotiation outcomes. Participants motivated to confront their partner expected anger to be more useful to them, and this expectation in turn, led them to try to increase their anger before negotiating. The subsequent experience of anger, in turn, led participants to be more successful at getting others to concede to their demands, demonstrating that what people want to feel can determine how they actually feel and how they behave, as a consequence.