Rethinking Positive Emotion Regulation

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This project aims to explore and challenge assumptions about the ‘right way’ to regulate emotions, articulating a new theoretical perspective on appropriate expression and suppression of positive emotion. People generally assume there are social benefits to expressing positive emotion and social costs to suppressing positive emotion. This project introduces a new perspective on emotion regulation that recognises that different contexts may call for different strategies. The project plans to test whether the positive emotions we think bring us closer can actually worsen social relations, and whether suppressing positive emotion, long believed to have negative social effects, can bring people closer in unexpected ways.