I’m doing it for me, not you: Self-focused goals lead me to suppress your emotions rather than engage with them

When regulating another person’s emotions, your aim could be to make them feel better (an other-focused emotion regulation goal) or to make yourself feel better by regulating their emotions (a self-focused emotion regulation goal). These different goals may drive differences in the regulation strategies you choose. The current pre-registered study (N = 55) uses a repeated-measures within-subjects design to compare the effect of self-focused versus other-focused goals on the use of eight strategies to make another person feel better (expressive suppression, downward social comparison, humour, distraction, direct action, valuing, cognitive reframing, and receptive listening). Compared to self-focused goals, we found that other-focused goals led to significantly higher valuing and receptive listening but significantly lower expressive suppression. Our findings suggest that affective engagement is the primary driver of which strategies are chosen for other-focused goals (where higher-engagement strategies are chosen) versus self-focused goals (where lower-engagement strategies are chosen). Future research could expand this initial finding to examine instrumental goals as well as hedonic goals and consider other modes of assessment.