The roles of positive emotion in the regulation of emotional responses to negative events.

Although research has shown that positive emotions (PEs) can help people cope with negative events, there is not yet a systematic framework for understanding how and when they might do so. In this article, I propose such a framework by suggesting that PEs can play 3 roles when people attempt to regulate their emotional response to negative events. First, PEs may serve as the ultimate target of emotion regulation (ER) such that people attempt to feel better by regulating their PEs regardless of whether they also regulate their negative emotions. Second, PEs may serve as a mediator of ER such that people regulate their PEs in order to satisfy their ultimate goal of regulating their negative emotions. Third, PEs may serve as a moderator of ER such that incidental PEs (those occurring from some other source besides ER) may moderate people's ability to regulate positive or negative emotions. I also discuss how to determine what roles that PEs are playing in a given instance of ER, how PEs may sometimes not help ER, and how this framework contributes to the burgeoning literature on regulatory flexibility by providing different roles of PEs in ER that may be more or less effective for different people and circumstances. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).