![]() ![]() Latent profile analysis (LPA) was implemented to explore individual differences in general emotion motives, and three different profiles of individuals were identified. This paper describes the literature concerning positive and negative emotion regulation motivations (both hedonic and contra-hedonic types) and shows how the new measure provides new information about people’s emotion motives. I then asked: what about other emotions? Would it be feasible and interesting to assess how individuals try to experience and try to avoid experiencing a range of positive AND negative emotions? The second paper of this thesis describes the development of a new self-report measure, termed the General Emotion Regulation Measure (GERM), that assesses how people are motivated to experience or avoid experiencing clusters of positive and negative emotions in their everyday lives. Happiness aversion research, similar to Study 1 described above, has documented that some individuals are motivated to avoid experiencing happiness (this non-conventional approach is termed ‘contra-hedonic’). Overall findings within Study 1 suggested that interventions which promote hope can be effective in disrupting the relationship between happiness aversion and depressive symptoms. Follow-up exploratory analysis with a small longitudinal sample suggested that the concurrent findings were replicated across time. Evidence was found that hope functioned both as a mediator as well as a buffer between happiness aversion and resultant depressive symptoms in a concurrent sample of 588 undergraduate psychology students. In this study, I sought to investigate the associations among happiness aversion, hope (a protective factor against negative mood states), and depressive symptoms. Importantly these individuals repeatedly also report elevated levels of depressive symptoms. Research on this so-called ‘fear of happiness’ or ‘happiness aversion’ tendency has identified about 10-15% of community samples as composed of individuals who report not wanting to experience happy mood states. The first research paper addresses the phenomenon that some individuals do not approach and seek to experience happiness in a normative fashion. To investigate the implications of holding one or the other type of motive, this thesis is composed of three studies that investigate the implications of holding these types of motives for emotions: 1) the first paper determined whether the motive to avoid happiness predicts depressive symptoms through the mechanism of lessened hope, 2) the second paper featured the development of a new measure designed to assess a broad range of motives for emotions, and 3) the third paper described the associations between this new measure with a commonly used emotion regulation measure. Sometimes people hold and seek to satisfy ‘contra-hedonic’ motives, i.e., trying to experience negative emotions. Typically it is assumed that everyone tries to experience the positive and avoid the negative, however research conducted over the last decade has demonstrated that not everyone is motivated to experience valenced emotions in this normative ‘hedonic’ fashion all of the time. The ways in which people regulate their emotions is central to achieving wellbeing in our everyday lives.
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