Curiosity As A Low-Effort Mechanism For Emotion Regulation

The ability to influence our emotional states, also known as emotion regulation, is an important indicator of psychological health. However, the techniques to do so vary not only in difficulty to learn, but difficulty to implement effectively. Curiosity, on the other hand, is generally associated with positive affect, intrinsic motivation, and intrinsic reward. These qualities make curiosity an excellent candidate as an emotion regulation technique that may be equally as effective as cognitive methods of emotion regulation while being less effortful. To test this, we conducted a series of three studies designed to evaluate whether curiosity serves as an efficacious and minimally effortful method of emotion regulation. Participants were prompted to create idiographic scenarios designed to increase negative affect before being briefly instructed on one of three emotion regulation techniques: upregulation, downregulation, and curiosity. Participants applied each of these techniques to the imagined scenarios before rating the techniques various measures of efficacy. We found that participants endorsed curiosity as effectively reducing negative affect relative to the upregulation control. Notably, curiosity was also endorsed as a lower effort method of emotion regulation relative to downregulation. This is the first study to demonstrate that curiosity can be used as a form of emotion regulation that is equally efficacious to, yet less effortful than, downregulation.