Assistant Professor of Psychology Emmanuel College Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Abstract Text:
Introduction: There has been a recent uprise in literature regarding the effect that emotion beliefs, such as beliefs about the extent to which emotions are useful or controllable, have on downstream outcomes within clinical, social, or interpersonal contexts. However, there is still a lack of research illuminating the relationship between emotion beliefs and our in-the-moment emotional responses and attitudes toward those responses. In this study, our aim was to examine whether beliefs about the controllability and usefulness of emotions predicted sadness level and one’s judgment of their internal experiences after a sad mood induction.
Method: A subsample of 45 community member participants from a larger experimental study (which consisted of male (n=6), female (n=37), and nonbinary (n=2) volunteers) completed the Emotional Beliefs Questionnaire (EBQ) to assess their personal beliefs about the controllability and usefulness of emotions (Ford & Gross 2018). After self-reporting emotion beliefs, the participants underwent a sad mood induction (watching a sad film clip) and then proceeded to rate their sadness and the extent to which they felt judgmental/self-critical of their current thoughts and emotions (state judgment). State judgment was measured using items from the non-judgment subscale of the Five-Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (Baer et al., 2006), modified for assessment of the present moment.
Results: Using linear regression analyses, the results indicated that EBQ subscale scores did not significantly predict sadness ratings immediately following the sad mood induction (all p values > .06). EBQ usefulness scores did not significantly relate to state judgment levels (b = 1.05, p = .14). However, EBQ controllability scores significantly predicted state judgment in a positive direction (b = 2.07, p = .01).
Discussion: Beliefs about the usefulness and controllability of emotions did not influence participants’ intensity of sadness following a sad mood induction; however, beliefs that emotions were less controllable were associated with feeling more judgmental of one’s sad thoughts and feelings post-mood induction. This analysis puts forth the idea that emotion control beliefs may deserve to be prioritized within future research on judgements regarding emotions. It has been consistently indicated within the literature that viewing emotions as less controllable is associated with a higher risk for lower psychological well-being. Our results raise the possibility that high levels of judgment of emotions is one path through which emotion beliefs could go on to influence mental health outcomes.
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