Emotions can shape the outcomes of social interactions. For instance, by communicating power or by cultivating trust, emotions such as anger and happiness can decide between failure and success in negotiations. If people can strategically regulate their emotional experiences, they could help shape the outcomes of social conflicts. The goal of the research, therefore, is to examine whether people engage in strategic emotion regulation and identify the factors that determine when and how they do so. The idea is that emotion regulation research should be informed by self-regulation research, more broadly construed. Previous research has demonstrated that people prefer experiences that they believe are useful and that are consistent with their goals. This project extends these ideas to the domain of emotion regulation. Although research in emotion regulation has been typically based on the assumption that people always want to feel good and avoid feeling bad, recent research has demonstrated that people can, in fact, be motivated to experience even unpleasant emotions when such emotions have strategic benefits. Building on such findings, the current project involves two lines of research. The first set of studies will examine whether beliefs about the usefulness of emotions determine what people want to feel in negotiations, how they regulate their emotions, and how this influences negotiation outcomes. The second set of studies will examine whether the goals people pursue as they negotiate give rise to different beliefs about the usefulness of emotions, which in turn, determine how they regulate their emotions and how they feel as they negotiate. By identifying what leads people to cultivate certain emotions in social contexts and how doing so influences the outcomes of negotiations, the research has important theoretical and pragmatic implications. The research will guide researchers and practitioners in identifying how emotional experiences can promote beneficial outcomes in negotiations and how people can cultivate useful emotions to promote adaptive behaviors in social conflicts.
