What Emotion Regulation Means In Psychology

In everyday use, regulating an emotion sounds like suppressing one. In the research literature it means something broader: any process that influences which emotion occurs, when it occurs, how intense it becomes and how it is expressed. On that definition, choosing not to walk down a particular street is regulation, and so is reframing an argument after the fact.

The staged framework

The organising idea in most of this work is that an emotional episode unfolds in stages. A situation arises or is sought out, some aspect of it draws notice, that aspect is appraised as meaning something, and a response follows across feeling, physiology and behaviour. Because the episode has stages, strategies can be sorted by where they intervene.

Selecting or modifying the situation acts earliest. Shifting what is attended to acts next. Changing the appraisal, usually described as reappraisal, acts once the material is already in view. Modulating the response, of which suppressing an expression is the standard example, acts last, when the episode is already under way.

Why the stage matters

The framework's main empirical payoff is that strategies acting at different stages have different profiles. Reappraisal studies generally report reduced self-reported emotion without a rise in physiological load. Expressive suppression studies generally report a changed outward appearance with the internal experience less affected and the physiological load unchanged or higher, along with costs to memory for what happened during the episode and to the ease of the interaction.

This is often reported as reappraisal being the good strategy and suppression the bad one. The literature does not support the flat version. Both are ordinary and both are context-dependent, and the situations in which an outward display would be costly are exactly the ones in which suppression is normally used.

Limits worth keeping in view

Much of this evidence comes from short laboratory episodes with instructed strategies, which is a long way from the uninstructed, prolonged and socially embedded episodes the framework is used to describe. The distinctions it draws are genuinely useful for thinking clearly about the topic. They are considerably less settled than a summary table makes them look.

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