@article{ref1,
title="Cruel to be kind: factors underlying altruistic efforts to worsen another person's mood",
journal="Psychological science",
year="2017",
author="López-Pérez, Belén and Howells, Laura and Gummerum, Michaela",
volume="28",
number="7",
pages="862-871",
abstract="When aiming to improve another person's long-term well-being, people may choose to induce a negative emotion in that person in the short term. We labeled this form of agent-target interpersonal emotion regulation altruistic affect worsening and hypothesized that it may happen when three conditions are met: (a) The agent experiences empathic concern for the target of the affect-worsening process, (b) the negative emotion to be induced helps the target achieve a goal (e.g., anger for confrontation or fear for avoidance), and (c) there is no benefit for the agent. This hypothesis was tested by manipulating perspective-taking instructions and the goal to be achieved while participants ( N = 140) played a computer-based video game. Participants following other-oriented perspective-taking instructions, compared with those following objective perspective-taking instructions, decided to induce more anger in a supposed fellow participant who was working to achieve a confrontation goal and to induce more fear in a supposed fellow participant who was working to achieve an avoidance goal.<p /> <p>Language: en</p>",
language="en",
issn="0956-7976",
doi="10.1177/0956797617696312",
url="http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0956797617696312"
}