Attitudes Toward Emotions
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology © 2011 American Psychological Association 2011, Vol. 101, No. 6, 1332–1350 0022-3514/11/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0024951 Attitudes Toward Emotions Eddie Harmon-Jones and Cindy Harmon-Jones David M. Amodio Texas A&M University New York University Philip A. Gable University of Alabama The present work outlines a theory of attitudes toward emotions, provides a measure of attitudes toward emotions, and then tests several predictions concerning relationships between attitudes toward specific emotions and emotional situation selection, emotional traits, emotional reactivity, and emotion regula- tion. The present conceptualization of individual differences in attitudes toward emotions focuses on specific emotions and presents data indicating that 5 emotions (anger, sadness, joy, fear, and disgust) load on 5 separate attitude factors (Study 1). Attitudes toward emotions predicted emotional situation selection (Study 2). Moreover, attitudes toward approach emotions (e.g., anger, joy) correlated directly with the associated trait emotions, whereas attitudes toward withdrawal emotions (fear, disgust) correlated inversely with associated trait emotions (Study 3). Similar results occurred when attitudes toward emotions were used to predict state emotional reactivity (Study 4). Finally, attitudes toward emotions predicted specific forms of emotion regulation (Study 5). Keywords: discrete emotions, approach motivation, withdrawal motivation, emotion regulation, behav- ioral activation system (BAS) Emotions pervade subjective experience (Izard, 2009), and al- theory by assessing relationships between attitudes toward specific though often perceived as a single subjective state, emotional emotions and emotional traits, emotional reactivity, emotional experience is likely composed of many different elements. Tom- situation selection, and emotion regulation. kins (1962, 1963) and others (Ellsworth, 1994; Izard, 1971) sug- gested that the evaluation of an emotion is part of the experience of emotion.
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