Helping you helps me: Beneficial effects of regulating others’ emotions on well-being and physiological stress

Improving others’ emotions is cognitively and emotionally demanding, potentially increasing regulators’ stress levels and decreasing regulators’ well-being. However, the opposite could also occur: Attempts at improving others’ emotions—i.e., affect-improving extrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation (EIER)—could enhance regulators’ affective well-being and shield against physiological stress because we theorize that affect-improving EIER can strengthen relationships, activate self-regulation, and elicit prosocial reward. In two studies, we test the consequences on regulators when they help others regulate their emotions. In Study 1, a 7-day diary study (N = 205; 1434 observations) of significant social interactions, regulators who reported they improved the emotions of others to a greater extent experienced more emotions, both positive and negative, during their interactions. Over the 7 days, they also experienced an increase in positive affect, no change in negative affect, and better affective well-being at the end of the study. In Study 2, a within-subject observational laboratory study (N = 94, 47 dyads, 235 observations), we find that during the minutes when regulators’ displayed greater behaviorally-coded attempts at improving targets’ emotions, regulators also experienced a corresponding buffering of increased physiological stress measured by pre-ejection period (PEP) reactivity. These findings empirically support the role of improving others’ emotions in regulators’ affective well-being over time and the protection against physiological stress when encountering others’ negative emotions. This work also contributes a theoretical framework for understanding why regulating others’ emotions is important for well-being.