 24. Emotion Regulation  527
for this idea comes from work showing that 
individuals who have greater awareness of 
bodily signals (e.g., heartbeats) are more suc -
cessful at using reappraisal than those who 
have lesser interoceptive awareness (Füstös, 
Gramann, Herbert, & Pollatos, 2013). In -
dividual differences in emotional awareness 
can also be assessed through self-  report 
with instruments such as the Trait Meta-
Mood Scale (TMMS; Salovey et al., 1995) 
and the Mayer–  Salovey–  Caruso Emotional 
Intelligence Test (MSCEIT; Mayer, Salovey, 
& Caruso, 2002). Studies suggest that in -
dividuals higher in openness to experience 
are highly aware of their own others’ emo -
tions (Costa & McCrae, 1995; Terracciano, 
Merritt, Zonderman, & Evans, 2003), so 
they might therefore be more likely to regu -
late emotions. Emotional differentiation, or 
the granularity with which individuals rep -
resent emotion, can also impact decisions 
of whether to regulate emotions (Barrett, 
Gross, Christensen, & Benvenuto, 2001; 
Tugade, Fredrickson, & Barrett, 2004). 
Similar to emotional clarity, those who have 
greater emotional differentiation, or a more 
fine- grained representation of emotion, 
would be more likely to detect undesirable 
emotional states that may need to be regu -
lated.
A second factor that can impact whether 
individuals see the need to regulate their 
emotions is goals. People have distinct emo -
tional preferences (Ford & Tamir, 2014; 
Tamir & Ford, 2012), and these preferences 
guide the recruitment of emotion regulation 
processes by acting as a comparison against 
which one can evaluate one’s current emo -
tional state (Eldesouky & Gross, 2019). 
Emotion regulation processes can be recruit -
ed to maintain a desirable emotional state, 
or bring an undesirable state into alignment 
with one’s preferences. Work on ideal af -
fect (Tsai, 2007) has shown there are stable 
individual differences in the emotions that 
people deem most desirable, as reflected in 
self- reports using the Affect Valuation Index 
(AVI; Tsai, Knutson, & Fung, 2006). Ideal 
affect tends to vary based on culture (Tsai et 
al., 2006) and age (Scheibe, English, Tsai, & 
Carstensen, 2013), such that lower-  arousal 
positive states (e.g., relaxed) are preferred 
over high-  arousal affective states (e.g., ex -
cited) among East Asians and older adults. These distinct emotional preferences can 
then impact the motivation underlying emo -
tion regulation efforts, such as hedonic goals 
(i.e., short-term goal of feeling positively or 
negatively; Tamir, 2009), or instrumental 
goals (i.e., long-term goals besides hedonic 
pleasure; e.g., Mauss & Tamir, 2014; Tamir, 
2016), which can also vary across individu -
als (Eldesouky & English, 2019a; English, 
Lee, John, & Gross, 2017). Moreover, re -
search suggests that personality traits are 
also linked to individual differences in spe -
cific emotion-  related goals. For example, 
extraverts exhibit a stronger desire to feel 
happiness than do introverts (Tamir, 2009) 
and are more motivated to regulate their 
emotions to feel positively (Eldesouky & 
English, 2019a ).
Beliefs are a third factor that can influence 
identifying the need to engage in emotion 
regulation. People differ in their perceived 
utility of emotions, such as how useful spe -
cific emotions are for achieving certain goals 
(e.g., whether happiness is more useful for 
collaborating with others than anger; Tamir 
& Ford, 2012). To the extent that someone 
finds an emotion useful, he or she may be 
more motivated to experience that emotion 
and therefore engage in regulation efforts to 
experience it more often and for longer. The 
motivation to regulate one’s emotions may 
also partly depend on the regulator’s attri -
butional style, or on how individuals explain 
the causality of good and bad events that 
occur to them (Peterson, 1991). In general, 
individuals who are more pessimistic tend to 
attribute bad events to causes that are inter -
nal, stable, and global, and good events to 
causes that are external, unstable, and spe -
cific (Friedlander, Traylor, & Weiss, 1986). 
This is largely rooted in a belief that they 
lack control over the events that happen to 
them. Given the beliefs associated with these 
attributional styles, individuals who believe 
they lack control over events that happen 
to them may also believe that emotions are 
difficult to control and therefore engage in 
less emotion regulation. Along these lines, 
beliefs about how much control one has 
over outcomes might predict the use of cer -
tain strategies, such as situation selection. 
Specifically, individuals higher in general 
control beliefs might be more likely to seek 
out positive situations given that they are 