Rethinking Positive Emotion Regulation (2016-2017)

People generally assume there are social benefits to expressing positive emotion and social costs to suppressing positive emotion. This project challenges these assumptions, exploring untested boundary conditions to these effects. It introduces a new perspective on emotion regulation that highlights the importance of social context¿¿¿recognising that different contexts call for different strategies. The project will test whether the positive emotions we think bring us closer can actually worsen social relations, with implications for development of shared identity and personal well-being. It will test whether suppressing positive emotion, long believed to have negative social effects, can bring people closer in unexpected ways.