Emotion judgments are people’s valenced thoughts and feelings in response to their emotions. People can make both positive and negative judgments about their emotions.
Positive judgments involve seeing emotions as good, helpful, appropriate, or useful. Negative judgments involve seeing emotions as bad, inappropriate, or harmful.
These judgments are important parts of people’s emotional reactions. Emotion judgments may powerfully shape overall emotion experiences and well-being.
Willroth, E. C., Young, G., Tamir, M., & Mauss, I. B. (2023). Judging emotions as good or bad: Individual differences and associations with psychological health. Emotion, 23(7), 1876–1890. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0001220
Key Points
- The research examined the nature of individual differences in how people judge their own emotions (emotion judgments) and implications for psychological health.
- Four types of habitual emotion judgments were identified: positive judgments of positive emotions, negative judgments of positive emotions, positive judgments of negative emotions, and negative judgments of negative emotions.
- These four emotion judgment factors showed moderate 10-week retest reliability, suggesting they are relatively stable individual differences.
- Emotion judgments were related to but not redundant with conceptually similar constructs like emotion regulation and stress mindsets.
- Positive judgments of positive emotions and negative judgments of negative emotions had unique links with better and worse psychological health, respectively.
- The findings highlight the importance of how people think about and judge their emotions for overall well-being.
Rationale
Emotion regulation research has focused extensively on people’s initial emotional responses, but less is known about how people subsequently evaluate and judge their initial emotions (Leger et al., 2018).
For example, does someone see their anger as justified and appropriate versus exaggerated and inappropriate?
The present research built on initial evidence that judgments people make about their emotions as good/bad or appropriate/inappropriate may also impact emotion experience and psychological health (Tamir et al., 2017).
Method
Across five samples (N = 1,647), the researchers developed a scale to assess individual differences in four types of emotion judgments.
They also examined links between habitual emotion judgments and conceptually related constructs, as well as multiple indices of psychological health, including symptoms of depression and anxiety, as well as life satisfaction and psychological well-being.
Emotion Judgments Questionnaire
The researchers created a pool of 63 initial scale items assessing positive and negative judgments of both positive and negative emotions.
Through exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses across several samples, they refined this item pool to a final 24-item self-report questionnaire capable of reliably assessing individual differences in the four hypothesized emotion judgments.
Sample
Diverse convenience samples of MTurk workers and college students in the U.S. and Canada. Age ranged from 18-70 years old. 45-85% female across samples.
Racial/ethnic composition varied across student and MTurk samples.
Statistical measures
Factor analyses examined the scale structure. Correlational analyses tested links to conceptually related constructs. Regressions tested unique links of the four judgment types to psychological health.
Results
Factor analyses showed there are four main types of emotion judgments: positive views of positive feelings, negative views of positive feelings, positive views of negative feelings, and negative views of negative feelings.
When people answered the emotion judgment questionnaire ten weeks apart, their scores were moderately similar (rs from .45 to .62), meaning people have relatively stable tendencies in how they judge feelings.
Emotion judgments were related to other ways of evaluating emotions, but were not measuring the exact same thing.
The researchers found that people who tended to positively judge their positive emotions (e.g., seeing one’s joy or excitement as good and beneficial) demonstrated higher overall well-being, including lower depression, less anxiety, greater life satisfaction, and better psychological functioning.
On the flip side, people who were prone to negatively judge their negative emotions (e.g., seeing one’s sadness or anger as bad and inappropriate) showed poorer well-being outcomes across those mental health indices.
Insight
The study moves beyond a binary view of emotion judgments as good or bad by systematically examining positive and negative judgments of both positive and negative emotions.
Critically, the links between positively judging positive emotions and better mental health, and between negatively judging negative emotions and poorer mental health, remained even after accounting for appraisals of the other emotion types (negative appraisals of positive feelings and positive appraisals of negative feelings).
Findings suggest emotion judgments constitute stable tendencies that have implications for well-being, not fully attributable to emotion regulation abilities or initial emotional responses.
Strengths
- Large and diverse samples strengthen generalizability
- Multi-method approach combining scale development, correlational, regression, and prospective analyses
- Examination of both between- and within-person implications
- Inclusion of conceptually related constructs to test divergence
Limitations
- Self-report biases are possible in both emotion judgment reports and psychological health measures
- Causality cannot be determined from the correlations
- Cultural generalizability outside North America is unknown
Implications
This research highlights the importance of how people evaluate their emotions in shaping overall emotional experience and psychological health.
Clinicians could consider helping clients identify and alter maladaptive patterns of emotional judgments.
Companies and educators may also benefit from utilizing strategies to encourage more adaptive judgments about normal emotional experiences.
Future Research
- Conduct experience sampling research to compare habitual judgment tendencies measured by the questionnaire to state emotion judgments made during emotional events in daily life. This could establish how much overlap there is between the two and whether state judgments show similar links to well-being.
- Study context-specific emotion judgment patterns to test whether certain judgments are more or less adaptive depending on the situation people are in when feeling emotions. For example, are negative judgments of anger more problematic when directed at friends versus competitors?
- Examine whether training programs that cultivate mindfulness, reappraisal, or other emotion regulation strategies simultaneously change patterns of emotion judgments. Changes in judgments could be an additional mechanism explaining the well-being benefits of such programs.
- See whether maladaptive emotion judgment patterns mediate the links between psychiatric diagnoses like depression and poor psychological health. This could reveal a specific mechanism to target in treatment.
References
Primary references
Willroth, E. C., Young, G., Tamir, M., & Mauss, I. B. (2023). Judging emotions as good or bad: Individual differences and associations with psychological health. Emotion, 23(7), 1876–1890. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0001220
Other references
Leger, K. A., Charles, S. T., & Almeida, D. M. (2018). Let it go: Lingering negative affect in response to daily stressors is associated with physical health years later. Psychological Science, 29(8), 1283-90.
Tamir, M., Schwartz, S. H., Oishi, S., & Kim, M. Y. (2017). The secret to happiness: Feeling good or feeling right? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 146(10), 1448-1459.
Keep Learning
Here are some Socratic discussion questions about this paper for a college class:
- Do you think emotion judgments play a bigger role in shaping people’s happiness and well-being compared to their initial emotional reactions? Why or why not?
- Can you think of examples from your own life or others’ lives that illustrate the links found between certain emotion judgment patterns and better or worse psychological health?
- What are some alternative explanations or third variables that might account for the observed correlations between emotion judgments and well-being? How might future research rule out these alternatives?
- Do you expect cultural factors to influence whether certain emotion judgments are seen as appropriate? How might this change the implications of different judgment patterns?
- If you were designing an intervention to help people struggling with maladaptive emotion judgment patterns, what specific strategies might you try and why? What challenges do you anticipate?
