Do Emotion Motives Constrain the Selections of Visual, Auditory, and Taste Stimuli to Up- and Down- Regulate Emotions?

This study was designed to investigate whether emotion motives, as measured by the General Emotion Regulation Measure (Bloore et al., 2020), influenced selection behaviour across visual, auditory, and taste domains. In a small sample of 58, participants were randomly assigned to one of the three conditions, where they engaged in narrative writing about high-point, everyday-point, or low-point experiences before completing a mood state questionnaire. Following this phase, participants performed a selection task across three trials, with five options ranging from “very sad/distressing/angry” to “very happy/peaceful/loving” in the visual and auditory domains, and from “very sweet” to “very bitter” or “not spicy/sour” to “extremely spicy/sour” in the taste domain. For each selection, participants rated each selected item on a scale from “extremely negative” to “extremely positive.” It was predicted that GERM hedonic motives would lead to selection of positive stimuli, while GERM contra-hedonic motives would lead to selection of negative stimuli, and individual ratings would also largely align with participants' emotion motives. Path model analysis revealed a significant positive relationship between mean scores of trying to experience positive emotions (one of the hedonic GERM motives) and overall selection and rating scores. The other three GERM emotion motives did not yield significant relationships. These findings support the role of positive emotion motives in 'situation selection' as emotion regulation, described by Gross (1998b). (220 words)