Social emotion regulation strategies are differentially helpful for anxiety and sadness

Little is understood about how emotion regulation strategies typically used to regulate one's own emotions can be used to help others in distress, a process we refer to as social emotion regulation. We integrated research on social support, the self-regulation of emotion, and appraisal theories to hypothesize that different kinds of support and emotion regulation strategies should be differentially helpful for others, depending on the kind of emotion they are experiencing. Specifically, we predicted that helping others to actively modify their situation, as opposed to their appraisals and emotional responses, will be more effective for those experiencing anxiety as anxiety is a response to appraising threat in one's environment. However, helping others to modify their appraisals and emotions should be more effective for those experiencing sadness as sadness is a response to an irrevocable loss. To test this, we created a novel paradigm in which regulation targets were recruited online to write about personal events causing anxiety or sadness and regulation providers were recruited to provide written help to the targets. Study 1 supported the hypothesis using strategies drawn from the social support literature (advice vs. emotional support). Study 2 used strategies drawn from the literature on the self-regulation of emotion (situation modification vs. reappraisal) to demonstrate that as predicted, different strategies are believed to be differentially helpful depending on the target's emotion and when adjusting for individual differences in social and affective functioning, targets judge social emotion regulation strategies to be differentially helpful when implemented by providers. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).