The Handbook of Emotion Regulation

Actionalbe Insights

Highlights

Conceptual Foundations of Emotion Regulation

What is Emotion?

• The term emotion refers to a diverse array of phenomena.
• Some are subtle (a twinge of guilt), others are intense (a pee-in-your-pants bout of amusement). Some are brief (a flicker of anxiety), others are extended (a spell of sadness). Some are relatively simple (disgust upon discovering an unidentified decomposing object in the back of the fridge), others are complex (the multivalent wash of emotions one sometimes gets during important life transitions). Some are private (a pang of regret at a missed opportunity), others are public (embarrassment at a highly visible faux pas).
• Drawing upon cybernetic theory, emotions may be viewed as arising through a series of iterative cycles comprising four elements
  • A situation that can be experienced or imagined
  • attention that determines which aspects of the situation are perceived
  • evaluation or appraisal of the situation in light of currently active goals
  • a response to the situation, including changes in experience, physiology, and/or facial or whole-body behavior
• Affect is an umbrella term for states that involve relatively quick good-for-me/bad-for-me discriminations. These include (1) emotions, such as anger and sadness; (2) stress responses in situations that exceed an individual’s ability to cope; (3) moods, such as depression and euphoria; and (4) impulses that can be broadly categorized as either appetitive or defensive.

One of the fundamental insights in affective science is that affective responses are (to some degree) amenable to regulation.

My focus here is one type of affect regulation—­ namely, emotion regulation—which refers to efforts to influence which emotions one has, when one has them, and how one experiences or expresses these emotions.

From my perspective, emotion regulation occurs when (1) an emotion is evaluated as good or bad, and (2) this evaluation activates a goal to change the emotion.

Process model of emotion regulation

• This framework describes four stages that undergird emotion regulation: identification, selection, implementation, and monitoring
• In the identification stage, a person decides whether a given emotional state should be changed to better approximate a desired emotional state (the emotion goal).
• A decision to change an emotional state triggers the selection stage, when the person decides where to intervene in the emotion-­ generative process.
  • seek to alter emotion by selecting which situations are encountered (situation selection)
  • modifying what is going on in them (situation modification)
  • Attentional strategies seek to alter emotion by changing what aspects of the situation are attended to.
  • Cognitive strategies seek to alter emotion by modifying how the situation or one’s goals are cognitively represented.
  • response modulation strategies seek to alter emotions by directly modifying emotion-­ related experiential, behavioral, or physiological responses.
• Strategy selection triggers the implementation stage, during which the person decides which specific actions to take.
  • one or more of the steps in the emotion-­ generative process that were outlined above can be enacted in different ways. These are referred to as regulation tactics.

Affect regulation includes (1) emotion regulation, (2) coping, (3) mood regulation, and (4) impulse regulation.

• Coping can be distinguished from emotion regulation both by its principal focus on decreasing negative affect, and by its emphasis on longer time periods.
• Moods are typically of longer duration than emotions, and are less likely to involve responses to specific “objects.”In part due to their less well-­ defined behavioral response tendencies, compared to emotion regulation, mood regulation is typically more concerned with altering emotion experience than emotion behavior.
• Impulse regulation refers broadly to the regulation of appetitive and defensive impulses, and one form of impulse regulation that has attracted particular attention is self-­ control.

Mental health is defined by (1) the absence of mental illness (including mental disorders and subclinical levels of negative affect; American Psychiatric Association, 2013) and (2) the presence of well-being (including emotional, cognitive, and social well-being; Keyes, 2005).

It’s also important to note that emotion problems (and other affective problems) may be due to problems with emotion generation (e.g., temperamental differences in the activation of emotion), as well as problems with emotion regulation.

Emotion dysregulation is an umbrella term that includes three ways in which emotion regulation may go awry

• emotion regulation failure (i.e., failing to regulate when it would be helpful to do so)
• emotion misregulation (i.e., regulating in a way that isn’t well matched to the situation)
• emotion regulation misexecution (i.e., using an appropriate strategy but failing to execute effectively)