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Key points
- People have a range of emotion goals, not just the goal to feel better.
- People can have goals to feel good and also to feel a certain way to achieve some other end.
- Situational, individual, and cultural factors all influence the emotions people want to feel.
- Emotion goals matter because they determine whether and how people try to change their emotions.
By Maia ten Brink, Ph.D. and James J. Gross, Ph.D.
So far, this blog series has focused on how to regulate our emotions so as to feel better, but is that always the goal? Sometimes people might not want to feel better. This is because people experience all kinds of emotion goals, not just the goal to feel better.
What are emotion goals?
Imagine there's a desirable opportunity at work to take on a leadership role for a new project that you are really passionate about. You tell your manager you think you'd be a perfect fit, but they express doubt that you are skilled enough for it and tell you not to waste your time reaching beyond your level. On the drive home, you listen to some rage-filled rock music. Later, you tell your partner about how hurt and angry you were that your manager didn't believe in your leadership capability. Your partner counsels you to simply let the negative comments roll off your back, but you don't want to – you want to make your manager eat their words.
Emotion researchers have found that people often have a range of emotion goals. Hedonic emotion goals are what we usually think of as default: a goal to feel pleasant emotions and to not feel unpleasant emotions However, people can have instrumental goals, which are goals to feel useful emotions to achieve another goal. This means that, perhaps counterintuitively, people can sometimes want to feel unpleasant emotions (termed “contra-hedonic” states). Sometimes emotions can serve both hedonic and instrumental goals at the same time.
Feeling hurt after hearing your manager’s comments and leaning into that feeling by listening to music that matches your emotional state could serve a hedonic goal because it feels good to validate your emotions. Feeling anger could serve an instrumental goal because you might channel your motivation into working hard, landing the role, and proving your manager wrong.
Emotion goals may not just be about the particular types of emotions people want to experience, but the emotions they want to express, the context they want to experience those emotions in, or the amount, timing, or duration of emotions they want to feel. For example, you might want to wallow in your angry feelings in the privacy of your home, but not while you’re at work, because showing anger at your manager might cost you a job. Another example is that, after the death of a loved one, you might want to feel intense grief for several months, but not for several years. It is important to remember, however, that it can sometimes be useful to feel unpleasant emotions and it would not be helpful to try to get rid of them.
Situational, individual, and cultural factors predict differences in emotion goals
Research demonstrates that people’s emotion goals shift quite a bit from situation to situation throughout daily life. As different goals get prioritized throughout each day, including focusing on tasks, behaving according to social norms, and relating to other people, people adapt their emotion goals to suit the situation they are in.
Nonetheless, some patterns emerge about how emotion goals can be consistent across different situations based on one’s personality. For instance, researchers demonstrated that people who tend to be neurotic also tend to endorse instrumental emotion goals focused on managing their impression on other people.
In addition to differences in emotion goals related to personality, there are also cross-cultural differences. Several studies have found that Americans and Europeans value intense positive states such as happiness, excitement, pride, and joy. East-Asians from China, Japan, and South Korea, however, prefer less intense positive states such as contentedness, interest, and calm. Another recent study showed that norms about the emotions people are supposed to experience and express are particularly strong in individualistic cultures such as those in the West.
Emotion goals are also relevant for psychological problems. People with clinical depression, it turns out, report being less motivated to feel high-energy positive emotions like excitement and happiness and more motivated to feel sad and low-energy states, choosing to expose themselves to melancholic music or exhibiting preferences for sad images. People with anxiety disorder, however, tend to be motivated to experience high-energy states, whether pleasant or unpleasant. Excessive focus on hedonic goals can often underpin psychological issues because many people struggle to tolerate distress and other contra-hedonic emotions. This can lead them to rely on emotion regulation strategies such as substance use to achieve hedonic goals in the short term but ultimately have long-term costs.
Why emotion goals matter
One reason emotion goals matter is because they determine whether and how people regulate, or try to change, their emotions. For instance, people who have instrumental motives, meaning that they view emotions as useful for achieving other goals, are more likely to choose to spontaneously regulate using strategies focused on expressing emotions, while people who have hedonic motives choose to change their emotion experience by changing the situation or how they think about it.
Another reason emotion goals matter is that they are key drivers of meta-emotions – that is, the emotions we have about our emotions. The mismatch between the emotion goals we value and the emotions we actually have can produce distress and self-judgment. If you want to feel excited about going on a date with someone new, but instead you feel sad thinking of your ex, you might have feelings about your feelings, such as feeling frustrated with yourself that you are still not over your ex. Or, if your friends want you to express contempt for the callous way that your ex broke up with you but you express how much you miss them, you might judge yourself as having the “wrong” emotions.
What are your own emotion goals?
For many people, the idea that emotions can be goals is not immediately intuitive. Take a moment to reflect on what kind of emotion goals you might have, perhaps operating outside of your own awareness, across different situations in your own life. What are the emotions you most often want or do not want to feel?
Now that you have practice thinking about emotions as goals, how do emotion goals specifically crop up in different situations in your life? Have you ever felt a discrepancy between the emotions you have and the emotions you want to have? If you find that it bothers you, it can be really helpful to start with trying to identify what those emotion goals might be serving – a hedonic goal to feel good, or an instrumental goal to use certain emotions to achieve something else?
Finally, think about the emotion goals themselves. Do they align with what you value? Are your emotion goals balanced between hedonic and instrumental goals?
If you tend to focus on hedonic goals, as is often our default, it can be helpful to remember that we need a mix: Too much emphasis on hedonic goals might lead us to maximize feeling good while sabotaging some of our other long-term goals, but too much focus on instrumental goals might lead us to to ignore how we actually feel in service of some other thing we want, which can also have negative long-term consequences.
Answering these questions is not easy, but trying to gain insight into our emotion goals can help us understand what might drive our choices about when to regulate our emotions, when not to regulate, and why we tend to regulate the way we do. With insight, we can identify potential ways to change.
Maia ten Brink, Ph.D. is a postdoctoral research scientist at the Center for Behavioral Cardiovascular Health at Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York City, USA.
