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Skill Issue: Relationship Between Beliefs About Emotions, Achievement Goals for Emotion Regulation, and Mental Health
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2025-05-19
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Abstract
Emotion regulation is important for various areas of functioning, including well-being and mental health (Aldao et al., 2010). Previous research (Rusk et al., 2011) shows that people differ on how motivated they are to demonstrate their ability to control their emotions (performance goals) and how motivated they are to learn to control their emotions better (learning goals). The current study explored the relationship between beliefs about controllability and usefulness of emotions and how much the participants endorsed higher performance and learning emotion regulation goals. The study also explored how emotion regulation goals and emotion beliefs correlated with various indicators of well-being. The initial correlational study showed that believing emotions can be controlled predicted higher performance-avoidance goals for emotion regulation, while believing that emotions were generally useful had a weak negative association with learning emotion regulation goals. Additionally, higher emotion controllability beliefs, predicted lower well-being, which was mediated by performance-avoidance goals. A second study was conducted to replicate the findings and assess the causal relationship between emotion controllability beliefs and performance-avoidance emotion regulation goals by manipulating emotion controllability beliefs. Correlation analysis showed results contrary to the first study, with higher controllability beliefs predicting lower performance-avoidance goals, higher performance-approach goals, and better well-being. The experiment did not show a significant increase in performance goals following the manipulation. More research is needed to confirm these findings and assess current methodologies in the field.
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Psychology