Goals and Means In Emotion Regulation Within Groups

Emotion regulation has been mainly studied at the individual and dyadic levels but we know very little about how regulation may unfold within groups of multiple people. We investigated two aspects that may affect collective emotion regulation, namely (1) whether regulation targeted at the others (vs. self) impacts group members who are not regulating and (2) whether providing the regulators with a useful method (cognitive reappraisal) is helpful for impacting others. We designed a novel web-based task that is completed online by six-person groups. Three members in each group were randomly assigned to one of the four experimental conditions in a 2 (goal) × 2 (method) design. The other three members were always observers in the control condition. Looking at the observers in each condition, results (N = 1,086) indicated that teaching the three members in the experimental conditions cognitive reappraisal lowered the negative emotions of the other three observers. This reappraisal effect is stronger when paired with a goal of regulating others (vs. self). However, only incentivizing those in the experimental conditions with the goal of regulating others but not teaching them a method failed to affect the observers’ emotions. Our study uncovers important aspects that can be useful in managing negative emotion contagion in groups and organizations.