Hope as a Trojan Horse in Sadness and Fear Regulation: Evidence for Emotion Self-Induction as a Regulatory Process

Among the many strategies studied for emotion regulation, cognitive approaches such as reappraisal or attentional deployment have received particular emphasis. This focus, however, may have obscured other, more intuitive affective pathways. We explored one such pathway: emotion self-induction (ESI)—the deliberate generation of an emotion to regulate another. In an exploratory online survey (N = 146), participants reported how often they used different types of ESI across contexts involving positive vs. negative and mild vs. intense emotions, and which specific emotions they employed to regulate sadness, fear, guilt, and shame. Results revealed that 90% of participants consciously used ESI at least occasionally. The most common form—inducing positive emotions to down-regulate negative ones—accounted for 83.8% of all reported use and occurred significantly more frequently than any other type ( p  < .001, AKP  = .67). This strategy correlated with adaptive regulation measures, suggesting that it belongs to a broader cluster of effective and well-being-related regulatory styles. Notably, hope emerged as the predominant emotion used to counter sadness ( p  < .001, AKP  = .70) and fear ( p  < .001, AKP  = .34). Based on these findings, we introduce the Oppositional Emotion Regulation Model (OERM), which proposes that regulation can arise from the structured opposition among emotions’ core components (e.g., appraisal, motivational tendency). By leveraging such oppositions, ESI may represent an intuitive, affect-based route to faster emotional recovery. This work invites direct experimental tests of the OERM to clarify the mechanisms linking emotional opposition and adaptive self-regulation.