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.
Key Points
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.
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 analysestested 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
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
Limitations
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 altermaladaptive patterns of emotional judgments.
Companies and educators may also benefit from utilizing strategies to encourage more adaptive judgments about normal emotional experiences.
Future Research
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:
Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc
BSc (Hons) Psychology, MSc Psychology of Education
Olivia Guy-Evans is a writer and associate editor for Simply Psychology. She has previously worked in healthcare and educational sectors.
Saul McLeod, PhD
BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester
Saul McLeod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.
