While negative feedback may feel unpleasant, it provides information and guidance to benefit the recipient.

Emotional manipulation, however, uses techniques to make someone feel bad intentionally to benefit the user.

Thus, manipulation often involves selfishness, disrespect, criticism, withdrawal, and diminishing others.

Sometimes, during social interactions, people hurt each other’s feelings or trigger negative emotions. In those instances, it can be difficult to distinguish between someone providing genuine and necessary negative feedback versus being intentionally hurtful for purposes of emotional manipulation. Fortunately, research into the strategies we use to change the feelings of others (known as Controlled Interpersonal Affect Regulation Strategies) can help us tell the difference. So, below, we will look at some of those strategies—and the details that can help you tell them apart!

Understanding Negative Affect Regulation Strategies

Niven, Totterdell, and Holman (2009) published a foundational article exploring the ways individuals influence each other’s emotions. Through that exploration, they obtained 955 examples of what they called interpersonal affect regulation strategies. Those examples were then grouped into a hierarchy of categories.

At the highest level, strategies were split between those that improved the emotions of others (Affect-Improving) and those that made someone’s mood worse (Affect-Worsening). From there, the affect-worsening strategies were split into the following two categories and seven........

© Psychology Today