Emotion Regulation

Emotions serve many important intra- and interpersonal functions. However, emotions also can be unhelpful when they are the wrong type or intensity for a particular context. At such times, emotion regulation is crucial. Emotion regulation refers to any process that influences the onset, offset, magnitude, duration, or quality of one or more aspects of an emotional response. Emotion-regulatory processes may be automatic or controlled, effortless or effortful, and unconscious or conscious. Emotion-regulatory processes may diminish, intensify, curtail, or prolong positive or negative emotion depending on the goal of regulation. Emotions can be regulated extrinsically, as when a parent soothes a crying child, and intrinsically, as when an individual decides to avoid a local establishment for fear of running into a former romantic partner.

Extrinsic emotion regulation has been a major focus in research examining the development of emotion regulation. For example, when a young child encounters a stressful situation and becomes visibly upset, this response is externally regulated when he seeks proximity to a parent or caregiver and subsequently displays lower levels of agitation. Especially early in life, parents have incredible influence over the regulation of their children's emotions, given the amount of control they have over their children's daily routines, including academic and social schedules, as well as sleep and eating habits. One important hallmark of development is thought to be the transition from primarily extrinsic emotion regulation to primarily intrinsic emotion regulation (e.g., when a child begins to use self-soothing techniques rather than relying on a caregiver).

Intrinsic emotion regulation falls under the more general umbrella of processes referred to as self-regulation. Contemporary emotion regulation research, which focuses largely on intrinsic emotion regulation, builds on prior work on psychological defenses, as well as stress and coping and mood regulation. However, it may be distinguished from these closely related constructs, as coping specifically targets the stress response and mood regulation targets more diffuse mood states. Successful emotion regulation is thought to be a crucially adaptive skill that protects against the onset and maintenance of mood and anxiety disorders and is considered an important dimension of emotional intelligence. Current research has focused on defining different types of emotion regulation and then comparing and contrasting them in terms of (a) their success in modifying multiple responses associated with the target emotion, (b) the cognitive costs of attempting to use them, and (c) their component cognitive processes.

One prominent theory of emotion regulation is the process model of emotion regulation, which builds on the modal model of emotion. To set the stage for this analysis, the modal model of emotion will be outlined, and the process model of emotion regulation that organizes different types of regulation strategies will be described in detail. Although these models are described in reference to intrinsic emotion regulation, they can be applied to extrinsic emotion regulation as well.