Motivated Emotion Regulation: Impacts on Effort, Affect, and Strategy Selection

Affective science literature has begun to acknowledge emotion regulation as a motivated process, and recognize that motivations to regulate our emotions might have important implications for emotional outcomes. Despite this acknowledgement, as well as evidence that emotion regulation depends on fundamental cognitive control processes that can be modulated by motivation, there is little research that experimentally manipulates motivation in the context of emotion regulation. To address this, we investigated emotion regulation task performance under baseline, extrinsic motivation, and intrinsic motivation conditions. Across two experiments, 149 participants completed an emotion regulation task under both baseline and motivation (extrinsic or intrinsic) conditions. During this task, participants were shown either negative or neutral images and asked to either regulate their emotions or attend and respond naturally. Self-report measures of negative affect, difficulty/effort, and regulation strategy choice were obtained after each trial. Under both extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, participants reported decreased negative affect and task difficulty relative to baseline. The presence of a motivator also significantly increased the reported use of regulation strategies such as reappraisal, identified as a high-effort cognitive strategy. Taken together, these results suggest that experimental manipulations of motivation may enhance emotion regulation performance (in terms of decreased negative affect) and effort (in terms of increased use of regulation strategies), consistent with previously observed effects of motivation on performance and effort in classic cognitive control tasks. These results further demonstrate that motivation has important implications for emotion regulation outcomes and call for further research into differential effects of distinct motivators.