Journal of personality and social psychology
-
This research investigates people's preferences for temporally separating or combining emotionally impactful events. For instance, do people prefer to experience 2 negative events (e.g., manuscript rejections) on the same day or on different days? Do people prefer to experience 2 positive events (e.g., manuscript acceptances) on the same or different days? This article proposes a renewable resources model that combines elements of decision-making models (prospect theory) with the notion that people possess limited but renewable physiological, cognitive, and social resources for dealing with emotionally impactful events. As predicted, Ss preferred to separate 2 positive events (the gain-savoring hypothesis), to separate 2 negative events (the multiple-loss-avoidance hypothesis), and to combine a positive and a negative event (the loss-buffering hypothesis). Ss displayed identical preferences for events from the academic, financial, and social domains.
-
The experience of a mood consists of more than emotional states such as happiness, anger, sadness, or fear. It also includes mood management processes that can facilitate or inhibit the experience of the mood reaction. ⋯ Also, both studies yielded evidence for the emotion-management dimensions of Plans of Action, Suppression, and Denial. These broader dimensions of mood experience predicted criterion variables such as empathy better than Pleasant-Unpleasant and Arousal-Calm dimensions alone.