Maya Tamir

Introduction

Maya Tamir is an Israeli psychologist and professor of psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she directs the Emotion and Self-Regulation Laboratory and has chaired the psychology department. She is one of the most influential researchers of emotion regulation alive, and her signature idea overturns the assumption that people always try to feel good: people, she has shown, will deliberately pursue fear, anger, or sadness when those states are useful for the task in front of them. Her work on "emotion goals" — what people want to feel and why — has reframed emotion regulation as a motivated, goal-directed process rather than a reflex for reducing distress, and she served as president of the Society for Affective Science in 2022–2023.

Early Life and Education

Tamir was born and raised in Israel and completed her undergraduate degree in psychology and management at Tel Aviv University. She has said that emotions fascinated her long before she studied them professionally — the sense that something so powerful shapes what we do more than we realize — and that she wanted to understand the mechanism behind it.

She earned her Ph.D. in social-personality psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, then completed postdoctoral training with James Gross at Stanford University, at the center of the modern experimental study of emotion regulation. The combination — Illinois's social-personality training and Gross's process model — positioned her to ask a question the field had largely skipped: not how people regulate, but why they want to regulate at all.

That question is a genuine gap rather than a rhetorical one. Gross's process model describes the stages at which an emotion can be changed and the strategies that do the changing, and it is silent on why one person tries to change an emotion and another does not. Tamir's contribution was to notice that the silence concealed an assumption — that the goal is always to reduce negative affect and increase positive affect — and that the assumption was doing a lot of work.

Academic and Professional Career

After four years on the faculty at Boston College, Tamir returned to Israel and joined the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she is now a full professor, directs the Emotion and Self-Regulation Laboratory, and has served as chair of the psychology department. Her research has been funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Israel Science Foundation, the European Union, and the German-Israeli Foundation, and she has published over a hundred scientific papers.

Her professional influence extends beyond her own laboratory: she is an action editor at the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and at Emotion Review, co-editor of the Cambridge series Studies in Emotion and Social Interaction, and served on the editorial board of Psychological Bulletin. In 2022–2023 she was president of the Society for Affective Science, where she made broadening the society beyond the United States and Europe a stated priority — an institutional version of the same complaint she has made about the field's samples.

Major Contributions to Psychology

Emotion Goals: What People Want to Feel

Tamir's central move was to treat desired emotions as a variable in their own right. Rather than assuming that the goal of regulation is always to feel better, she showed that people hold emotion goals — states they want to reach — and that these goals determine whether, when, and how hard they regulate. Someone about to confront an unfair colleague may want to feel anger; someone facing a threat may want fear that sharpens attention. Her work treats these goals as elements of a hierarchical system in which emotions serve other things people want.

Counter-Hedonic Emotion Regulation

In a series of experiments, Tamir and her collaborators demonstrated that people will choose to increase unpleasant emotions when those emotions are instrumentally useful — and that doing so can improve performance and outcomes. Work with Chi-Yue Chiu and James Gross distinguished hedonic motives (wanting to feel good) from instrumental motives (wanting to feel what helps), and subsequent studies showed that anger can be strategically increased before a confrontation and that fear can be cultivated before a threatening task: participants who were choosing a piece of music before a competitive confrontation picked music that would make them angrier, and performed better for it. The finding directly challenged the field's default assumption that health and adjustment consist of maximizing positive affect.

Traits and Trait-Consistent Regulation

Her 2005 study of neuroticism showed that people sometimes pursue feelings that fit their personality rather than feelings that feel good: individuals high in neuroticism, preparing for a demanding task, preferred to maintain worry, and performed no worse — evidence that what counts as "adaptive" regulation depends on the person and the goal, not on the valence of the emotion.

Emotion Goals in Health, Relationships, and Culture

Tamir's program extends the framework to consequential outcomes: emotional goals predict relationship quality, political attitudes, psychopathology, and well-being, and vary across individuals, groups, and cultures. In collaboration with Brett Ford she has argued directly with philosophical and psychological theories of well-being, asking whether people should pursue feelings that feel good or feelings that do good — and showing that many people, much of the time, choose the latter.

A Cybernetic Account of Regulation Effort

Her recent theoretical work reconceives effortful emotion regulation as a form of cybernetic control: people monitor the gap between what they feel and what they want to feel, and regulation is initiated and sustained in proportion to that discrepancy and to the strength of the motive. The account generates testable predictions about why people sometimes regulate hard and sometimes not at all.

Major Publications

Tamir, M. (2005). Don't worry, be happy? Neuroticism, trait-consistent affect regulation, and performance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 89, 449–461.
Tamir, M., Chiu, C.-Y., & Gross, J. J. (2007). Business or pleasure? Utilitarian versus hedonic considerations in emotion regulation. Emotion, 7, 546–554.
Tamir, M., Mitchell, C., & Gross, J. J. (2008). Hedonic and instrumental motives in anger regulation. Psychological Science, 19, 324–328.
Tamir, M., & Ford, B. Q. (2012). Should people pursue feelings that feel good or feelings that do good? Reflections on theories of well-being. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7, 397–401.
Tamir, M. (2016). Why do people regulate their emotions? A taxonomy of motives in emotion regulation. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 20, 199–222.

Impact and Legacy

Tamir's work changed what researchers measure. "Desired affect" is now a standard variable in emotion research, and the idea that regulation is motivated rather than merely corrective — that the question "why does this person want to feel this way?" is scientifically answerable — is now central to the field. Her framework has been taken up in clinical, organizational, and cross-cultural research, and it complicates the simple equation of well-being with positive affect that dominates popular positive psychology.

The program has also drawn pointed criticism:

Desired affect is measured, not observed in action. Most studies ask people what they want to feel, often in hypothetical scenarios, and infer regulation from brief lab inductions. Whether stated emotion goals actually guide behavior outside the lab — and whether people can accurately report motives they may not be aware of — remains contested. The worry is specific: if asked why they chose anger-inducing music, participants will supply a reason, and the experiment cannot distinguish an instrumental motive from a post-hoc rationalization of a choice made for other reasons.
Counter-hedonic effects are small and context-bound. The laboratory demonstrations typically involve mild, brief manipulations with select samples; critics question whether deliberately cultivating anger or fear is as effective or as harmless in everyday life, where emotions are harder to switch off once turned on. The clinical implication cuts both ways: if anger is sometimes instrumental, then interventions that reliably reduce anger may sometimes be removing a resource, and the field has not worked out when.
Culture may be doing the work. Jeanne Tsai's affect valuation theory argues that what people "want" to feel reflects culturally shaped ideals about desirable affect, not calculated instrumental utility. On that reading, some of Tamir's findings may capture culturally transmitted preferences rather than strategic reasoning — a direct challenge to the interpretation rather than the data. If the ideal in a given culture is high-arousal positive states, people in it will report wanting them, and an experiment that treats the report as evidence of strategy has not distinguished the two.
Causality runs both ways. Links between emotion goals and well-being or relationship quality are largely correlational: depressed or anxious individuals may report different desired emotions because of their condition rather than the reverse, and the field has few longitudinal or intervention studies settling the direction.
The usual generalizability problem. Like most work in this tradition, the evidence comes disproportionately from Western and Israeli student and community samples, and the replication difficulties that have affected social psychology's induced-affect paradigms apply here as well. Emotion inductions are among the procedures that have proved least robust when repeated.

Tamir has responded by formalizing the theory — the cybernetic account and the motive taxonomy are attempts to specify mechanisms precisely enough to be falsified — and by pushing the work toward culture, development, and applied settings rather than defending the early demonstrations as final.

Learn More

Positive Psychology — the study of well-being that Tamir's counter-hedonic findings complicate.
Coping Strategies — how people manage stress in everyday life.
James J. Gross — her postdoctoral mentor, whose process model she extended by asking what regulation is for.
All Psychologists — browse the full biographical collection.