Emotion Regulation Efficacy Beliefs: The Outsized Impact of Base Rates

To regulate others’ emotions effectively we must learn about the efficacy of our regulation attempts. Deciding whether we made someone else feel better involves a causal judgement about the effect of our intervention on their emotional state. The current study examined whether, like other causal judgments, beliefs about emotion regulation efficacy are disproportionately affected by base rates. In two experiments, we showed that participants’ perceived efficacy at helping a target regulate their emotions was more influenced by the target’s average emotion levels than the relative effect of regulating vs not regulating the target’s emotion. This led participants to conclude that they were helpful both when they were not (Experiment 1) and even when they made the target feel worse (Experiment 2). These findings suggest that our beliefs about the effectiveness of other-directed emotion regulation are notably biased by the average level of emotion expressed by the regulation target.