Abstract
This investigation tested whether people are more willing to experience and express sadness, the more useful they expect sadness to be. Building on assumptions about the function of sadness, we predicted that people would expect sadness to be more useful when eliciting help to prevent a loss (vs. not). In Study 1, we examined preferences for sadness and its expected usefulness when eliciting donations for the sake of preventing a loss (vs. not). In Study 2, participants expected to elicit help to prevent a loss (vs. attain a benefit). In both studies, participants expected sadness to be more useful and were more willing to experience and express sadness when eliciting help to prevent a loss (vs. other reasons). Furthermore, the more useful participants expected experiencing and expressing sadness to be, the more willing they were to experience and to express sadness, respectively. We discuss the implications for research on emotion regulation.
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Notes
All causes were presented in random order. The loss focused causes included a local homeless shelter, cancer research, a charity fundraiser, hurricane victims, and an impoverished child. The non-loss focused causes included a local art museum, deep sea research, National Public Radio Broadcasting, preservation of a historic site, a politician’s election campaign.
In Study 1, some of the variables were not normally distributed. We therefore ran Wilcoxon’s matched-pairs signed-ranks tests and found the same pattern of results. Preferences for experiencing sadness remained significantly higher when eliciting donations to prevent losses (vs. non), z = 7.00, p < .001 and the expected usefulness of sadness was also higher in that context, z = 7.38, p < .001. The same pattern was obtained for the expression of sadness, (z = 6.92, p < .001, and, z = 7.57, p < .001, for preferences and expected usefulness, respectively).
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Hackenbracht, J., Tamir, M. Preferences for sadness when eliciting help: Instrumental motives in sadness regulation. Motiv Emot 34, 306–315 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-010-9180-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-010-9180-y