What do I want to feel? Emotion goal in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood

Abstract

Beliefs about emotion utility can influence adults’ motivation to endorse positive or negative emotion goals (i.e., desired emotional responses) depending on the context. Endorsing flexible emotion goals is key for appropriate emotion regulation. Despite their relevance, emotion goals have been overlooked in children and adolescents. We conducted three studies evaluating children’s, adolescents’ and adults’ contextualised happiness and anger goals and their beliefs about utility in contexts of collaboration and confrontation. Results of Studies 1 and 2 showed that children were less motivated by and found anger less useful in confrontation. The link beween emotion goals and beliefs about emotion utility was stronger in adults and adolescents. Study 3 showed that children’s emotion goals differed from their emotion expectations, ruling out expectations as a possible explanation of the findings in Studies 1 and 2. These results suggest that the instrumentality or context-sensitivity of emotions may be acquired during development