A classification of controlled interpersonal affect regulation strategies

Area of Science:

• Social Psychology
• Affective Science
• Interpersonal Dynamics

Background:

• Interpersonal affect regulation involves deliberately influencing another person's emotional state.
• Existing research highlights the prevalence of this everyday social process.
• A need exists for a structured understanding of the diverse strategies employed.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and test a theoretical classification scheme for interpersonal affect regulation strategies.
• To organize existing research and guide future empirical investigations in this domain.
• To differentiate between various methods used to intentionally alter others' emotions.

Main Methods:

• Generation of a corpus of 378 distinct interpersonal affect regulation strategies.
• Data collection via self-report questionnaires and diaries from student and working samples.
• Validation through a card-sort task with 20 participants and hierarchical cluster analysis.

Main Results:

• The developed classification scheme effectively represents spontaneous understandings of interpersonal affect regulation.
• Strategies were primarily distinguished by their goal: improving versus worsening affect.
• A secondary distinction emerged between situational/affective engagement and relationship-oriented strategies.

Conclusions:

• The proposed classification provides a meaningful framework for organizing research on interpersonal affect regulation.
• This scheme facilitates future conceptual and empirical distinctions in the study of emotion regulation between people.
• Understanding these strategy types can enhance research on social influence and emotional connection.