Beliefs about whether emotions Should be controlled and Can be controlled are two beliefs about controlling emotions. Because past research has generally examined Should and Can emotion control beliefs only separately and in general terms, that is, without reference to aspects of emotions (e.g., valence, response channel), three crucial questions remain unanswered: (a) Are these two beliefs distinct types of emotion control beliefs, and, within each belief, (b) are they distinguished by and (c) do they differ across aspects of emotion? To advance measurement and understanding of emotion control beliefs, I created the Beliefs about Emotion Control Inventory (BECI), which measures Should and Can emotion control beliefs across valence (positive vs. negative) and channel (behavior vs. experience). Two preregistered studies with large student (Study 1A/1B, Ns=430/1,112) and non-student adult (Study 2: N=1,319) samples that varied in age (largely 18-25 vs. distributed across 18-71) and gender (predominantly women vs. equal men and women), revealed results consistent with the preregistered hypotheses. Specifically, Should and Can emotion control beliefs were distinct types of beliefs that were distinguished by and differed as a function of valence and channel. Should emotion control beliefs were stronger (i.e., higher means) for experience (vs. behavior), negative (vs. positive) emotions, and experience (vs. behavior) differences were larger for negative (vs. positive) emotions. Can emotion control beliefs were stronger for behavior (vs. experience), but similar across valence. In each study, (a) age was linked with stronger Can, but not Should, emotion control beliefs, and (b) men held stronger Should and Can emotion control beliefs than women, especially for Should beliefs. Our results suggest that peoples’ beliefs about whether emotions Can and Should be controlled are distinct beliefs, distinguished by and vary in different ways across valence and response channel, and influenced by both age and gender.

Emotions are a core feature of human experience, with questions about what an emotion is dating back centuries. Recent psychological theorizing has proposed the coherence postulate, which maintains that 1) during emotions multiple response systems, including experience, behavior, and physiology, will become synchronized, or cohere, and 2) higher levels of coherence should contribute to beneficial outcomes. Although the coherence postulate serves as a critical foundation for how researchers think about and study emotion, a surprisingly small number of studies have directly tested it. The current work addresses three critical questions that arise from the coherence postulate for two types of coherence (i.e., experience-behavior and experience-physiology). First, what is the best approach for measuring coherence? Second, how much do emotional responses cohere with one another, across response systems and contexts? Third, is coherence associated with greater well-being? To address these questions, 160 female participants completed two standardized laboratory tasks (i.e., a film clip with amusing and sad scenes and a stressful speech) and a survey six months later assessing their well-being. During each task, I obtained continuous measures of emotional experience, behavior, and physiology (inter-beat interval, skin conductance level, and heart rate variability). For the first question, I systematically examined the influence of different timing resolutions of the emotional responses and lag windows (1, 2, 5, 10, and 15 s) on coherence estimates. Results suggest that the second-by-second timing resolution with the 10-s lag window present the best approach. For the second question, across the sample, I observed positive and significant levels of experience-behavior coherence for both the film clip and the speech. However, I found less evidence for experience-physiology coherence; except for a positive and significant level of experience-skin conductance coherence in the film clip, I found no evidence for other types of experience-physiology coherence. Additionally, coherence was generally not consistent across types of coherence (i.e., experience-behavior coherence was not related to experience-physiology coherence) and across the two tasks. For the third question, I found that experience-behavior coherence in the film clip was linked with greater well-being. The current findings provide the most consistent evidence for the presence and importance of experience-behavior coherence, whereas the evidence for the presence and importance of experience-physiology coherence is much less clear.

People are not impassive bystanders to their emotional experiences. Instead, people tend to judge their emotions as good or bad. In this research, I examined individual differences in emotion judgments and their implications for emotional responses and psychological health. In Study 1 (N = 1,136), I developed a questionnaire to assess four types of habitual emotion judgments. The four types of emotion judgments differed according to the valence of the emotion being judged (positive or negative) and the valence of the judgment (positive or negative). In Study 2 (81 participants and 2,999 observations), I examined the relationship between habitual emotion judgments and emotion judgments in daily life. Emotion judgments were common in daily life and were predicted by habitual emotion judgments. In Study 3 (same participants as in Study 1), I examined cross-sectional associations between habitual emotion judgments and psychological health. Positive judgments of positive emotions were associated with greater psychological health and negative judgments of negative emotions were associated with poorer psychological health, above and beyond other types of emotion judgments and key confounds. In Study 4 (111 participants and 835 observations), I examined prospective links between habitual emotion judgments and psychological health over one month and the mediating role of net emotions (emotions that linger after an emotional event has passed). Negative judgments of negative emotions were associated with worse psychological health one month later, and this relationship was partially mediated by daily net emotions. In sum, individuals differ in the types of emotion judgments that they tend to make and these individual differences appear to powerfully shape daily emotional responses and in turn, psychological health.

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