Polias, Shayne G. (2024) Interpersonal affect worsening scale (IAWS): Development and validation of a new questionnaire to assess motives and strategies. Doctoral thesis, Liverpool Hope University.
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Abstract
Interpersonal emotion regulation, or managing others’ emotions, does not always entail directing others’ feelings to positive states, but also inflicting or upregulating negative emotions. The process of causing others to experience unpleasant emotions is called interpersonal affect worsening. Although research in interpersonal emotion regulation has progressed, interpersonal affect worsening has only received limited attention. The relative lack of research on interpersonal affect worsening can partly be due to the limited assessment tool that can delineate between the motives for interpersonal affect worsening and the regulation strategies to achieve it. Therefore, this thesis focused on the development of the interpersonal affect worsening scale (IAWS), a tool that aimed to measure motives and strategies in interpersonal affect worsening.
Drawing upon theoretical models by Tamir (2016) and Niven (2016), items were designed to assess motives, namely instrumental (i.e., wanting another person to perform well
so as to achieve a goal), altruistic (i.e., looking after what will benefit the person), and conformity (i.e., maintaining social norms and harmony). For the development of items to assess regulation strategies, the Interpersonal Affect Classification (Niven et al., 2009) was considered as it is the only model that explicitly discusses regulation strategies in relation to affect worsening. Specifically, items were created to evaluate the strategies of affective engagement (i.e., altering how others think about the situation or the consequences of their actions), putting own feelings first (i.e., openly showing annoyance or anger towards others), and rejecting others’ emotions (i.e., being overtly mean towards others). Importantly, instead of a general or context-free questionnaire (e.g., Classical Test Theory, Fan 1998), the items and scenarios were generated based on the examples of real-life experiences within family, peers, or work provided by 41 people. After going through readability testing by another 12 IV people, and interrater reliability of two researchers, only six scenarios with three items for motives and three for strategies were included in the final version of the IAWS.
The first study (Chapter 2) conducted with 355 participants recruited from a University in the Northwest of England aimed to study the factor structure of the IAWS and the reliability of the scales. The exploratory factor analysis for motives yielded factors based on scenarios not according to the suggested factors (i.e., instrumental, altruistic, and conformity). Meanwhile, the strategies resulted in a two-factor structure model separating Engagement (i.e., affective engagement) and Rejection (i.e., putting own feelings first).
The second study conducted (Chapter 3) aimed to evaluate the fit of the model obtained for the regulation strategies through confirmatory factor analysis, consturct and
criteria validity, and test for measurement invariance. Participants were recruited in the United Kingdom (n = 325) and the Philippines (n = 221 individuals). Confirmatory factor analysis showed good model fit indices, confirming the two-factor structure (i.e., Engagement, Rejection). Correlation with established measures supported construct and criterion validity for the IAWS. Furthermore, the IAWS reached measurement invariance showing its applicability to two different countries. The findings also showed the differences between the strategy use, where participants from the Philippines reported a higher use of Engagement compared to the participants from the United Kingdom.
Lastly, a third study (Chapter 4) was carried out to assess measurement invariance between younger (n = 231) and older adults (n = 203) from the United Kingdom, given that
previous studies in emotion regulation highlighted important differences between these age groups in terms of emotionality and regulation skills. Results showed measurement invariance, for both Engagement and Rejection subscales of the IAWS, thus, allowing comparisons between younger and older adults. In addition, results showed that while young V and older adults did not differ in their mean scores for Rejection, older adults reported a higher tendency to use Engagement.
The results obtained in the thesis are discussed (Chapter 5) in relation to existing findings and theories regarding affect worsening motives and strategies. The findings
contribute to the limited empirical evidence on the process of affect worsening, particularly the strategies that people use to induce negative emotions on others, as the strategies suggested so far had not received any empirical support. Based on the outcomes of the studies, the strategies that individuals employ to worsen others’ affect seem to include in their definition the motives that drive people to use them (i.e., while Engagement seems to entail altruistic/instrumental motives, Rejection involves counter-hedonic motives in their definition). This opens an interesting debate as to whether motives and strategies can be separated in the process of interpersonal affect worsening. In addition, the thesis found that strategy use in affect worsening could be potentially different depending on the culture, and in different developmental stages. Therefore, this opens the door to further studies to better understand what social contexts may make certain regulation strategies more prevalent and what variables in the lifespan may account for changes in strategy use.
| Item Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Additional Information and Comments: | Copyright © The Author 2024. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge. Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| Keywords: | scale development, interpersonal affect worsening, culture, age differences |
| Faculty / Department: | Faculty of Human and Digital Sciences > School of Psychology |
| Depositing User: | Matthew Adams |
| Date Deposited: | 30 Apr 2024 08:02 |
| Last Modified: | 30 Apr 2024 08:02 |
| URI: | https://hira.hope.ac.uk/id/eprint/4206 |
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