Beliefs about emotion usefulness are nuanced: degree of personal reference and emotional valence predict affective distress.

Abstract

The beliefs people hold about emotions are implicated in a variety of outcomes including emotion regulation success and overall well-being. However, research on the dimensions of such beliefs is limited, typically addressing broad beliefs about all emotions and focusing only on their controllability. This study investigated emotion usefulness beliefs, specifically, and further parsed dimensions of personal reference (general vs. personal emotions) and valence (positive vs. negative). Study 1 (N = 343), applying a 2 × 2 factorial ANOVA, revealed that participants believed negative emotions in general to be more useful than their own negative emotions, with no such difference emerging for positive emotions. Multiple regression analyses indicated that personal beliefs about emotions better predicted affective distress than general beliefs. Study 2 (N = 531) replicated these findings and employed confirmatory factor analyses to psychometrically assess the distinctiveness of these emotion belief dimensions. Evaluating a two-factor model, four-factor model, and three-factor bifactor model, results showed that both the four-factor and bifactor models fit the data well, whereas the two-factor model did not. These findings suggest that beliefs about emotion in general and beliefs about one's own emotions may not be fundamentally distinct, but rather different dimensions of the same underlying emotion usefulness belief.