How Hedonic and Contra-Hedonic Motivations to Experience Positive and Negative Emotions Predict Dysfunctional Emotion Regulation and Depressive Symptoms

The ways in which people regulate their emotions is central to achieving wellbeing in our everyday lives. 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. Sometimes people hold and seek to satisfy ‘contra-hedonic’ motives, i.e., trying to experience negative emotions. 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. The first research paper addresses the phenomenon that some individuals do not approach and seek to experience happiness in a normative fashion. 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. Importantly these individuals repeatedly also report elevated levels of depressive symptoms. In this study, I sought to investigate the associations among happiness aversion, hope (a protective factor against negative mood states), and depressive symptoms. 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. Follow-up exploratory analysis with a small longitudinal sample suggested that the concurrent findings were replicated across time. Overall findings ...