Breaking Away From Destructive Feedback: The Role of Emotion Regulation in Negative Self-Verification

People often favor self-verifying feedback which reinforces existing self-beliefs, a preference that can further entrench negative self-views. Prior work suggests that emotional responses to the prospect of receiving non-self-verifying feedback may influence whether people engage in self-verification; however, the contribution of emotion regulation to feedback choices is unclear. The current study aimed to explore how affective processes affect whether people choose to observe feedback that is likely to either confirm or disconfirm their existing self-views. Participants (N = 202) completed an online survey to assess their self-views, emotion regulation habits, and preference for self-verifying feedback in a simulated feedback task. Additional open-ended questions assessed how participants' made their feedback choice, what they were feeling, and whether they managed their emotional response to make their decision. The qualitative results demonstrated that the choice of negative self-verifying feedback was related to the desire for subjective accuracy, consistent with existing theories of self-verification. However, our results also indicate significant relationships between emotion regulation habits and feedback choice among participants with high depression symptom severity. This study's findings provide new insights into the cognitive and affective determinants of self-verification, suggesting that for individuals with depression, training in engagement-based emotion regulation could potentially lessen negative self-verification tendencies.