Emotional Intensity Outdoes Emotion Type in Predicting Regulation Goals and Strategies: A Daily Diary Experimental Study

There is evidence that people use different strategies to regulate sadness versus anger. However, prior studies have not controlled for emotional intensity as a confounding variable nor explored whether people form different goals to regulate sadness versus anger. The current pre-registered study addresses these two research gaps using a within-person experimental manipulation of emotion type (sadness versus anger) embedded in a daily diary design. Undergraduate psychology students completed six end-of-day surveys (N = 239 participants, n = 1039 surveys), which asked about either an angry event or a sad event that day. Participants rated the event’s emotional intensity, four regulation goals (pro-hedonic, pro-social, impression management, and performance) and five strategies (reappraisal, expressive suppression, social support seeking, distraction, and rumination). Compared to anger, sadness resulted in significantly stronger distraction, rumination, and pro-hedonic goals (but not other strategies or goals), even after controlling for intensity. Within-person regressions where the four goals predicted each strategy found significant effects of different goals on reappraisal, distraction, expressive suppression, and rumination. Emotional intensity was significantly stronger for sadness than anger, supporting the idea of an intensity/emotion type confound. Moreover, intensity significantly predicted greater use of all strategies and two goals (pro-social and impression management goals). These findings suggest that emotional intensity is a more important contextual factor than emotion type for determining goals and strategies. Future studies should examine the effect of intensity on goals experimentally and test whether the causes of anger and sadness matter for predicting goals and strategies.