Emphasizing other-focused over self-focused goals elicits more high-engagement strategies and less expressive suppression when regulating others’ emotions

When regulating someone’s emotions, your goal might be to make them feel better (other-focused regulation goal) or to make yourself feel better (self-focused regulation goal; e.g., reducing their distress to relieve your own negative feelings). These contrasting goals may drive differences in regulation strategies. The current pre-registered study ( N = 55) uses a repeated-measures within-subjects design to compare strategies chosen when participants were instructed to achieve pro-hedonic goals that were self-focused versus other-focused. Eight regulation strategies varied in how much engageme