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

When regulating someone’s emotions, your goal might be to make them feel better (other-focused regulation goal) or to make yourself feel better (self-focused regulation goal; e.g., reducing their distress to relieve your own negative feelings). These contrasting 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 strategies for pro-hedonic other-focused versus self-focused goals. Strategies represented low (expressive suppression, downward social comparison), moderate (humour, distraction, direct action) or high (valuing, cognitive reframing, receptive listening) engagement with the other person. Compared to self-focused goals, other-focused goals led to significantly higher valuing and listening but lower suppression. Moreover, there were significant main effects for engagement (across goals, people used more high-engagement strategies than suppression—the lowest-engagement strategy), for goals (across strategies, people engaged in greater regulation for other- than self-focused goals) and their interaction (greater use of high-engagement strategies than suppression was stronger for other- than self-focused goals). Our findings suggest that affective engagement is the primary driver of which strategies are chosen to make someone else versus yourself feel better. Future research could examine instrumental as well as hedonic goals and consider more objective assessments.