Strategy But Not Goal Determines Group Emotions Regulation Effectiveness

Authors:

Abstract: Emotion regulation has mainly been studied at the individual and dyadic level, but we know little about how regulation may unfold within groups of multiple people. We investigated two aspects that may affect collective emotion regulation: whether regulators’ goal is targeted at others’ (vs. self) emotions, and whether regulators learned cognitive reappraisal. We designed a web-based task that was completed in groups of six. In each group, three members (regulators) were randomly assigned to one of four experimental conditions in a 2 (goal) × 2 (method) design. The other three members (observers) were in the control condition. Looking at the observer responses (N = 1,446), results indicated that teaching regulators cognitive reappraisal significantly lowered observers’ negative emotions. However, only incentivizing regulators with the other-focused goal failed to affect the observers’ emotions. Looking at trial-by-trial data, the others-focused goal effect increased with trial numbers and only became significant in the last five trials. To unpack the mechanism, we trained a random forest classifier to identify reappraisals in participants’ comments on the stimuli in each trial based on word embeddings. With the classifier, we found that the proportion of reappraisals in regulators' comments increased over time in the other-focused goal-only condition, showing that regulators might need time to figure out an effective method. Our study uncovers important aspects that can be useful in managing negative emotion contagion in groups.

Track: TEAM

Keywords: emotion regulation, group emotion, emotion contagion