The emotion you want may not be the one that feels good
Before a difficult conversation, one person tries to calm down. Another puts on music that sharpens irritation. A third rehearses the insult until anger becomes easier to access. From a simple wellbeing perspective, the second and third choices can look irrational. Why deliberately move toward an unpleasant emotion?
Maya Tamir's research programme is important because it changes the question. Emotion regulation is not only an attempt to reduce distress or increase pleasant feeling. It can also be an attempt to create an emotional state that seems useful for something else: confrontation, concentration, belonging, accuracy, moral action, achievement, closeness, or the preservation of a valued identity.
That shift sounds small. It is not. It moves emotion regulation from a model of emotional housekeeping toward a model of motivated action.
Identity and research programme
Maya Tamir is a professor of psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem whose work has examined emotion goals, motives for emotion regulation, desired emotional states, and the consequences of wanting particular emotions. The research programme asks a question that sits one step before many familiar studies of regulation strategy: before a person reappraises, suppresses, accepts, amplifies, avoids, or approaches an emotion, what emotional state are they trying to produce, and why?
That distinction matters because a strategy cannot be judged only by whether it lowers negative affect. A person may regulate successfully toward an unpleasant state if that state serves a goal they value. Conversely, a person may successfully produce a pleasant state that undermines a longer-term aim. Tamir's work therefore helps separate emotional pleasantness from emotional utility.
The Institute treats this as a consequential contribution to the study of human capacity. It does not mean that every desired emotion is wise, healthy, socially constructive, or accurately chosen. It means that emotion regulation has a motivational architecture as well as a strategic one.
Emotion goals come before emotion strategies
A useful way to read Tamir's work is to distinguish two layers. An emotion goal concerns the state a person wants to feel, or wants to avoid feeling. An emotion-regulation strategy concerns what the person does to move toward or away from that state.
This separation prevents a common conceptual shortcut. If a person chooses cognitive reappraisal, the choice tells us something about strategy. It does not, by itself, tell us the desired endpoint. Reappraisal may be used to become calmer, less ashamed, more hopeful, more detached, or even more angry depending on how the situation is construed. Likewise, suppression can be used for social tact, concealment, self-protection, performance, conformity, or fear of exposure.
Tamir and colleagues have argued that people regulate emotions in the service of goals that extend beyond immediate feeling. This places emotion regulation inside a broader motivational system. What a person wants to feel can depend on the task, the anticipated consequences of emotion, social norms, values, and beliefs about what a given emotion will help them accomplish.
Hedonic and instrumental motives
Tamir's 2016 review proposed a taxonomy that distinguishes hedonic motives from instrumental motives. Hedonic motives concern the immediate experience of feeling good or avoiding feeling bad. Instrumental motives concern what emotions may help a person do or obtain beyond their immediate pleasantness.
The instrumental category was further organized around potential behavioral, epistemic, social, and eudaimonic benefits. A person might want anger because they believe it will support confrontation. They might want concern because it keeps attention on a risk. They might prefer an emotional display that coordinates with a group. They might value an emotionally difficult experience because it feels meaningful or congruent with who they are trying to be.
This taxonomy is theoretical organization, not a claim that motives always fit neatly into one box. Motives can coexist. A person may want relief and social acceptance at the same time. They may believe anger will improve performance while also enjoying the sense of power it brings. The taxonomy is most useful as a way to ask better questions rather than as a diagnostic grid for classifying people.
Evidence for utility, not merely pleasure
One of the clearest demonstrations comes from work by Tamir, Brett Ford, and Margaret Gilliam on utilitarian motives. In a negotiation preparation study, participants who expected confrontation judged anger as potentially useful. Crucially, the motivation to increase anger was strongest when confrontation was paired with an expected performance reward. The finding supports the idea that people can seek an unpleasant emotional state because of its expected utility, not simply because they enjoy feeling it.
Earlier work in the same research programme also examined preferences for anger or fear when those states appeared useful for a goal. The larger point is not that anger reliably improves negotiation, fear reliably improves threat response, or unpleasant emotion is secretly beneficial. It is that anticipated function can shape emotional preference.
That is an evidence boundary worth protecting. A study showing that people want a feeling they believe will help them does not establish that the feeling actually helps. Emotion goals can be based on accurate beliefs, cultural learning, habit, superstition, identity, or mistaken predictions.
Values, culture, and the emotions people prefer
Emotion goals also vary across social and cultural contexts. Work by Tamir and collaborators has connected desired emotional states with values and cultural patterns. This is compatible with a wider affective-science literature showing that cultures differ in ideal affect, display rules, and beliefs about emotion.
The strongest interpretation is not that a country assigns one emotional preference to every person within it. Cultural averages do not erase individual variation, migration, subcultures, age, gender, class, profession, or immediate context. Nor do values operate independently of institutions. A military unit, family, start-up, classroom, religious setting, and hospital ward can reward different emotional styles within the same national culture.
For the Institute, the useful implication is that emotional regulation cannot be understood only inside the individual. People learn what it is sensible, admirable, dangerous, childish, professional, feminine, masculine, spiritual, strong, or shameful to feel. Those learned preferences can become part of the motivational layer of regulation.
Methods used in this research programme
The programme spans experimental studies, self-report measures, cross-cultural comparisons, conceptual synthesis, and work on emotion beliefs and preferences. This methodological breadth is a strength because it allows motives to be studied at several levels. It is also a reason to resist turning the entire programme into one effect size.
Experimental studies can manipulate task goals or incentives and observe changes in desired emotion. Self-report studies can examine what people say they want to feel and how those preferences relate to values or functioning. Cross-cultural work can investigate population patterns. Reviews can organize the conceptual space. Each method answers a different question and brings different limitations.
Self-reported emotion goals are especially vulnerable to introspective limits and social desirability. Experimental tasks can simplify motives that are entangled in real life. Cross-cultural comparisons can confuse national-level indicators with individual-level processes. The evidence is therefore strongest when claims remain close to the method that produced them.
What this work changed
The field of emotion regulation has often been organized around strategies: reappraisal, suppression, distraction, acceptance, situation selection, and related processes. Tamir's work makes it harder to discuss those strategies without asking what they are for.
That matters in at least four ways.
First, it complicates the assumption that healthy regulation means maximizing pleasant affect. Second, it directs attention to the beliefs that connect emotion with expected consequences. Third, it helps explain why the same person may want different emotions in different situations. Fourth, it makes room for social and cultural motives rather than treating regulation as a private contest between a person and their feelings.
This contribution also connects naturally to research on emotion-regulation flexibility. A flexible system is not simply one with many strategies. It also needs goals that are responsive to context and the capacity to update those goals when expected utility proves wrong.
Critiques and open questions
The motivational perspective raises difficult questions that remain active.
How accurately do people predict the usefulness of an emotion? When does an emotion goal improve performance and when does it become self-fulfilling distortion? How stable are emotion goals over time? How do power and social norms shape which emotions people are permitted to pursue? When people report wanting an emotion, are they describing the feeling itself, its expression, the action tendency associated with it, or an identity linked to it?
There is also a normative problem. Instrumental value is not moral value. Anger might help someone dominate a negotiation while damaging trust. Emotional detachment might improve performance in one role while narrowing sensitivity elsewhere. A motive can be effective for a local goal and still be costly for relationships, institutions, or long-term wellbeing.
The evidence base does not provide a universal algorithm for choosing the right emotion. It provides a framework for understanding why emotional goals deserve to be studied.
What the evidence does not show
Tamir's work does not show that unpleasant emotions are generally good for people, that pleasant emotions are naïve, or that a person should deliberately intensify anger, fear, or sadness to perform better. It does not show that people always know why they regulate emotion. It does not show that desired emotion causes better mental health. It does not establish that culturally common emotional preferences are optimal, biologically fixed, or shared by every person in a culture.
Most importantly, the distinction between hedonic and instrumental motives does not make utility synonymous with accuracy. People can be wrong about what an emotion will do for them.
Institute synthesis: from strategy choice to goal architecture
The following is Institute synthesis rather than a settled scientific construct.
For Inner Technology, Tamir's programme suggests that emotional capacity requires more than a repertoire of regulation strategies. It also requires the ability to inspect the goal architecture behind regulation. What state am I trying to create? What do I expect that state to help me do? Who taught me that this feeling is useful here? What evidence would make me update that expectation? What happens to other people when I optimize my own state for the task?
This is not a demand for constant self-analysis. Often regulation is fast and implicit. The point is that a mature system can sometimes bring its motives into view, especially when a familiar emotional pattern repeatedly produces poor outcomes.
At institutional scale, the same question becomes cultural. Organizations regulate emotion through incentives, norms, meeting rituals, dashboards, professional identities, and informal sanctions. A workplace may reward urgency because it believes urgency produces speed. A school may reward calm because it believes calm produces learning. A political movement may reward outrage because outrage mobilizes participation. Whether those emotional goals actually serve the larger purpose is an empirical and ethical question.
Tamir's contribution gives that question a precise place to stand. Before asking whether regulation succeeded, ask what success was supposed to mean.
Current relevance
As artificial systems increasingly support planning, communication, negotiation, persuasion, and emotional reflection, people may receive more external guidance about how to feel or present themselves. That makes the motivational layer more, not less, important. A system can help a person down-regulate anxiety, intensify confidence, or phrase anger more strategically. It cannot settle the human question of which emotional goal is worth pursuing.
The enduring value of Tamir's research programme is therefore not a prescription for particular emotions. It is a correction to an overly simple picture of regulation. Humans do not merely move away from bad feelings and toward good ones. They regulate in the service of purposes, and those purposes deserve scrutiny.
A useful distinction between wanting and liking
One of the deeper implications of the motivational approach is that wanting an emotion and liking an emotion need not coincide. A person can prefer an emotional state because they expect it to support action even when the state itself is unpleasant. That distinction resembles broader motivational research in which anticipated usefulness, reward, and felt pleasure can come apart.
For emotion science, this prevents a subtle category error. If a participant chooses anger before a confrontation, the choice does not establish that anger is pleasurable. If someone wants sadness while listening to meaningful music or remembering a loss, that preference does not imply a wish for suffering in general. The target can be meaning, preparedness, identity congruence, solidarity, or another valued outcome.
This distinction also sharpens intervention questions. A person may resist down-regulation not because they are incapable of calming themselves but because calm feels incompatible with justice, loyalty, vigilance, or performance. In that case, teaching an additional strategy may not address the actual decision point. The emotion goal itself, and the belief linking that emotion to the goal, becomes relevant.
Motives can conflict inside the same moment
Real episodes rarely contain one motive. Someone preparing to give critical feedback may want enough anger to feel firm, enough calm to listen, enough anxiety to stay careful, and enough warmth to preserve the relationship. The person is not choosing one emotion from a menu. They are coordinating a mixed state under constraints.
This is one reason single-emotion experimental tasks should not be generalized too quickly. Their value is analytical: they isolate a relationship that is difficult to see in daily life. Their limitation is the same isolation. The richer question for future research is how people prioritize competing emotion goals and whether flexible coordination predicts functioning better than any preferred emotion in isolation.
That question becomes especially important where social power is unequal. A manager may be free to pursue anger because it signals authority, while an employee may suppress the same state because expression carries risk. The emotional goal is therefore partly personal and partly political. Motive research can describe preference, but explanation may require the social structure in which preference was learned.
Evidence grade and profile boundary
This page profiles a research programme, so there is no single page-level evidence grade. Experimental claims are strongest where goals or incentives were manipulated; cross-sectional preference findings are more limited; conceptual taxonomies organize evidence but are not themselves empirical effects. Influence is also separate from validity. A highly cited idea can be important to the field while individual propositions remain open to revision.
Research references
Tamir, M. (2016). Why Do People Regulate Their Emotions? A Taxonomy of Motives in Emotion Regulation. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 20(3), 199–222. https://doi.org/10.1177/1088868315586325
Tamir, M., Ford, B. Q., & Gilliam, M. (2013). Evidence for utilitarian motives in emotion regulation. Cognition & Emotion, 27(3), 483–491. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2012.715079
Tamir, M., Vishkin, A., & Gutentag, T. (2020). Emotion regulation is motivated. Emotion, 20(1), 115–119. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000635
Tamir, M., Mitchell, C., & Gross, J. J. (2008). Hedonic and instrumental motives in anger regulation. Psychological Science, 19(4), 324–328. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02088.x
Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Emotion and Self-Regulation Laboratory. Institutional research profile. https://emotion.huji.ac.il/