What we believe about supporting others in distress: Implications for providing social regulatory support and subsequent well-being

When someone shares their troubles with us, how do we decide how to respond? While decades of research has characterized how people talk about emotional events, less is known about how people choose to respond to others' distress. To address this issue, we bridged research from affective science and social psychology to develop the Regulator Beliefs about Social Regulation (RBSR) scale, which measures an individual's beliefs about the kinds of support distressed others might want and how they tend to act as social regulators of them. Three studies examined the nature of these beliefs and their impact on social interactions in close relationships. Study 1 used factor analyses to select 12 items for the RBSR scale that captured four theoretically meaningful and distinct beliefs. Study 2A showed that individuals with high RBSR scores are generally more emotionally expressive, better self-regulators, less lonely and experience more positive and less negative emotions. Studies 2B and Study 3A demonstrated that a regulator’s beliefs vary across situations and are sensitive to the intensity of a distressed target’s negative emotions. Study 3B found that, in real world interactions, the different kinds of beliefs assessed by the RBSR scale predicted target emotions, feelings of closeness and perceptions of their partner’s real-world regulatory behaviors. Taken together, this work is significant in at least two ways: Theoretically, it describes how beliefs about social regulation contribute to well-being. Methodologically, it offers a validated tool for assessing these beliefs across multiple kinds of social, affective, organizational and clinical contexts.