Whether and How to Regulate: Emotion Regulation in Negative-Feedback Situations

Emotion-regulation goals are often studied in isolation, despite them typically occurring in the presence of alternative goals. Negative feedback situations offer an intriguing context to study the interplay of emotion- regulation goals (wanting to feel better) and performance goals (wanting to perform better). Across five pre- registered online studies (N = 1,087), we investigated emotion-regulation choice (i.e., whether and how to regulate) in feedback situations. Challenging the assumption that the goal to perform better is the focal goal in negative-feedback situations, we show that negative feedback increases the salience of the goal to feel better via negative affect in Studies 1–2. Moving beyond the question of whether people regulate their emo- tions when they receive negative feedback, we examined how they regulate their emotions in Studies 3–5. Focusing on the relative importance of the goals to feel and to perform better, we found that the goal to per- form better but not the goal to feel better influences negative-feedback recipients’ emotion-regulation strat- egy choice. A salient goal to perform better was associated with a preference for reappraisal over distraction. These results have critical implications for the emotion-regulation literature and models of feedback process- ing from an emotion-regulation perspective. They demonstrate that affect-oriented processes such as emo- tion regulation operate when people receive negative feedback. They also highlight the importance of studying alternative goals given their relevance for how people regulate their emotions. From a practical standpoint, the findings may help us to better understand why people sometimes fail to perform better following negative feedback.