Why we have emotions at all is an age-old question. But why people manage emotions in certain ways and the effects that has on mental health has recently become a popular area of study. When it comes to emotion and motivation, what motivates people to attempt to modify or manage their emotions?
Emotion regulation is thought of as the automatic or effortful methods humans use to manage our emotional reactions. This regulation can occur in general and in response to large-scale stressors. As a basic tenet, much of the reason people regulate emotions is to meet both personal needs and social demands. We are social creatures, after all.
So why do people suppress emotions when it might help to express them? Why do people ruminate on relationship difficulties if they could approach their partner about what’s bothering them? The mental health field has traditionally viewed reasons we regulate emotion through the lens of “hedonic motives”. That is, the way we regulate emotions is based on what helps us maximize pleasure and avoid pain. But like so many things in mental health, the reason we regulate emotions is not so cut-and-dry (surprising, I know…).
An impressive series of studies by social psychologist Maya Tamir finds there are many reasons people regulate their emotions. Many of these reasons center around individuals’ desire to regulate their emotions to help facilitate their social or emotional goals.
People are often even be willing to or desire to experience more difficult emotions in the interest of these aims. Sometimes people just want to feel upset or annoyed or angry. This is not to blame the victim. Research views this motivation as a very natural human response that often occurs automatically as a learned behavior. Certain patterns of emotion and motivation reinforce emotion regulation over time depending on context.
Many of these patterns involve some pay-off or “function”. For example, sometimes an individual may want to experience annoyance toward a romantic partner because doing so leads the partner to attempt to make repairs and facilitate closeness. (The long-term viability of this behavior would depend on many factors.)
Or an individual may continue to experience deep longing and prolonged grief by continuing to look at pictures of a lost loved for long periods each night. But doing so functions to provide a sense of closeness and presence with the person lost. Patterns of continued substance abuse despite multiple negative life impacts also provides a set of examples.
Tamir’s line of research provides strong evidence that the reasons people regulate emotions are not so straightforward. This also accounts for why we see many clients experience difficulty changing unhealthy behaviors they realize work against their values. It is also why approaches like Motivational Interviewing are effective in helping clients shine light on contradictory outcomes to help them determine their readiness to work for true behavior change.
