Abstract: With increased population mobility, emotional support from strangers has become an essential supplementary resource for individuals coping with emergencies. Interpersonal emotion regulation (IER), wherein one individual (the regulator) intentionally influences another’s (the target) emotional state during social interaction, plays a critical role in alleviating emotional distress, fostering harmonious relationships, and promoting social cohesion. However, the impact of interpersonal distance on this process remains underexplored. Moreover, the role of emotion sharing, a key cue in emotional communication, in moderating these effects lacks empirical examination. This study investigates the mechanisms underlying the influence of interpersonal distance and emotion sharing on IER, comprising two experiments.
Experiment 1 employed a 2 (interpersonal distance: friend vs. stranger) × 2 (emotion intensity: low vs. high) within-subjects design to examine how interpersonal distance affects the regulator’s selection of emotion regulation strategies during IER. Results showed that low-intensity negative emotions did not yield significant differences in strategy selection between friends and strangers. In contrast, when negative emotions were high in intensity, participants were more likely to adopt contextual-adaptive strategies when regulating friends than strangers. Building on these findings, Experiment 2 incorporated eye-tracking technology to further elucidate the effect of interpersonal distance across three key phases of IER: emotion identification, strategy selection, and strategy output. Additionally, emotion sharing was introduced as a moderating variable to examine its role in mitigating the gaps posed by interpersonal distance. Employing a 2 (interpersonal distance: friend vs. stranger) × 2 (emotion sharing: present vs. absent) within-subjects design, the study assessed emotion identification (pupil diameter), strategy selection (proportion of contextual-adaptive strategy), and strategy output (pupil diameter and self-reported regulation difficulty). Findings revealed that, in the absence of emotion sharing, participants exhibited a stronger preference for adaptive strategies and reported lower regulation difficulty when regulating their friends. Moreover, participants expended reduced cognitive resources during emotion identification (small pupil diameter) and allocated greater cognitive resources during strategy output (larger pupil diameter) for their friends, highlighting the nuanced cognitive demands associated with close interpersonal relationships. Notably, explicit emotion sharing by strangers effectively bridged the gaps caused by greater interpersonal distance. It facilitated the adoption of contextual-adaptive strategy, reduced subjective regulation difficulty, and optimized cognitive resource allocation by decreasing cognitive load during emotion identification and enhancing cognitive resource engagement during strategy output.
This study provides novel empirical evidence on the impact of interpersonal distance on IER from the perspective of the regulator and further elucidates the moderating role of emotion sharing in this process. The findings support and extend the Social Regulatory Cycle Model, particularly by demonstrating how the regulator’s cognitive processes vary as a function of interpersonal distance. By integrating emotion sharing from the target into the model, the present study highlights its positive role in optimizing IER. Overall, these findings provide valuable theoretical and empirical insights into the cognitive mechanisms underlying IER, highlighting the interplay between interpersonal distance and emotion sharing in shaping regulation processes. Practically, this study offers guidance for enhancing emotional support protocols in diverse social settings, fostering better interpersonal interactions and psychological well-being.

Key words: interpersonal emotion regulation, interpersonal distance, emotion sharing, pupil diameter