Believe, express, and enjoy: utility beliefs about social emotion expression consistently predict satisfactory outcomes

The present study investigates the association between people’s beliefs about emotion and their overall satisfaction with a social interaction. We focus on three specific aspects to examine this association: (a) utility beliefs—a dimension of emotion beliefs; (b) emotion expression—an emotion channel; and (c) four social emotions—anger, other-embarrassment, gratitude, and other-pride. We examine whether people’s utility beliefs about expressing a social emotion can predict their evaluation of a social interaction when they express (vs. suppress) their social emotion. Results (N = 209) consistently show that when people express their social emotion, their utility beliefs positively predict their satisfaction with an event. However, when people suppress their gratitude, their utility beliefs negatively predict their satisfaction, an effect not observed in the other three emotion events. These findings corroborate the claim that emotion beliefs impact people’s emotional lives. Implications for research on emotion beliefs and motivated emotion regulation are discussed.