Emotion Regulation

Publication Date

2020

Document Type

Article

Organizational Units

College of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences, Psychology

Keywords

Emotion regulation, Cognitive reappraisal

Abstract

Emotion regulation (ER) refers to attempts to influence emotions in ourselves or others. Over the past several decades, ER has become a popular topic across many subdisciplines within psychology. One framework that has helped to organize work on ER is the process model of ER, which distinguishes 5 families of strategies defined by when they impact the emotion generation process. The process model embeds these ER strategies in stages in which a need for regulation is identified, a strategy is selected and implemented, and monitoring occurs to track success. Much of the research to date has focused on a strategy called cognitive reappraisal, which involves changing how one thinks about a situation to influence one’s emotional response. Reappraisal is thought to be generally effective and adaptive, but there are important qualifications. In this article, we use reappraisal as an example to illustrate how we might consider 4 interrelated issues: (a) the consequences of using ER, either when instructed or spontaneous; (b) how ER success and frequency are shaped by individual and environmental determinants; (c) the psychological and neurobiological mechanisms that make ER possible; and (d) interventions that might improve how well and how often people use ER.

Copyright Date

2020

Copyright Statement / License for Reuse

All Rights Reserved
All Rights Reserved.

Rights Holder

American Psychological Association

Provenance

Received from author

Language

English (eng)

Publication Statement

Copyright is held by the American Psychological Association. User is responsible for all copyright compliance. This article was originally published as:

McRae, K., & Gross, J. J. (2020). Emotion regulation. Emotion, 20(1), 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000703

Publication Title

Emotion

Volume

20(1)

First Page

1

Last Page

9

ISSN

1528-3542

PubMed ID

31961170



Share

COinS