The Social Matrix of Emotion Expression and Regulation

Definitions

Scholars disagree about definitions of emotion and even debate whether such discussions are worthwhile (Bard & Cornelius, 2007). [Page 364]They generally agree, however, that emotions are complicated phenomena whose workings, especially in the social world, are best captured by studying them from a variety of theoretical perspectives. Most researchers either posit working definitions or proceed with implicit definitions they believe will be palatable to readers and work well enough to advance the research.

For our purposes, we draw on Keltner and Gross's (1999) definition of emotions as “episodic, relatively short-term biologically based patterns of perception, experience, physiology, action, and communication that occur in response to specific physical and social challenges and opportunities” (p. 468). Intuition and empirical research offer joy, love, surprise, fear, anger, sadness, disgust, and shame as examples but exclude enduring mood states such as depression and dis-positions such as social anxiety (Sedikides, 1992; Watson & Clark, 1992). Emotion expression refers to the outward manifes tations of emotional states. However, expression is sometimes used in the limited sense of nonverbal “displays” of emotional states (primarily in facial patterns) as well as in the broader sense of communicative behaviors that reference emotions that have no characteristic display pattern. Emotion regulation refers to the processes by which individuals control the intensity and quality of emotional experience and the degree to which this experience is fully expressed, if at all (Gross, 1998). Indeed, there may be no such thing as a truly spontaneous emotion untouched by regulation. The ubiquitous shaping forces of language and cultural learning are inherent constraints on both the content of emotional experience (Barrett, Mesquita, Ochsner, & Gross, 2007) and its expression and regulation (Davidson, 2003).

Theoretical Approaches to Emotional Expression and Regulation

Although the broad conceptual landscape of emotional expression and regulation (hereafter EER) is difficult to map, several theoretical approaches emerge as useful, albeit with substantial overlap among them. We offer a brief description of each perspective as it guides research on EER and informs the discussions of EER at the four levels of analysis that follow.

Functional. In his essays on the evolutionary advantages of emotions in man and (other) animals, Darwin (1872/1965) was first to recognize that emotions are functional responses to environmental cues. More recently, scholars have extended the notion of survival to include the protection and continuation of the collective (i.e., social and cultural groups) as well as the individual (e.g., Cosmides & Tooby, 2000). Thus, Darwin's theory of evolution as applied to emotion is now reflected in theories clustered within functional approaches to EER.

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