Emotional self-regulation
The self-regulation of emotion or emotion regulation is the ability to respond to the ongoing demands of experience with the range of emotions in a manner that is socially tolerable and sufficiently flexible to permit spontaneous reactions as well as the ability to delay spontaneous reactions as needed. It can also be defined as extrinsic and intrinsic processes responsible for monitoring, evaluating, and modifying emotional reactions. The self-regulation of emotion belongs to the broader set of emotion regulation processes, which includes both the regulation of one's own feelings and the regulation of other people's feelings.
Emotion regulation is a complex process that involves initiating, inhibiting, or modulating one's state or behavior in a given situation — for example, the subjective experience, cognitive responses, emotion-related physiological responses, and emotion-related behavior. Functionally, emotion regulation can also refer to processes such as the tendency to focus one's attention to a task and the ability to suppress inappropriate behavior under instruction. Emotion regulation is a highly significant function in human life.
Every day, people are continually exposed to a wide variety of potentially arousing stimuli. Inappropriate, extreme or unchecked emotional reactions to such stimuli could impede functional fit within society; therefore, people must engage in some form of emotion regulation almost all of the time. Generally speaking, emotion dysregulation has been defined as difficulties in controlling the influence of emotional arousal on the organization and quality of thoughts, actions, and interactions. Individuals who are emotionally dysregulated exhibit patterns of responding in which there is a mismatch between their goals, responses, and/or modes of expression, and the demands of the social environment. For example, there is a significant association between emotion dysregulation and symptoms of ADHD, depression, anxiety, eating pathology, and substance abuse. Individuals diagnosed with mood disorders and anxiety disorders also experience dysfunction in the automatic regulation of emotions, further impacting their emotion regulation abilities. Higher levels of emotion regulation are likely to be related to both high levels of social competence and the expression of socially appropriate emotions.
Theory
Process model
The process model of emotion regulation is based upon the modal model of emotion. The modal model of emotion suggests that the emotion generation process occurs in a particular sequence over time. This sequence occurs as follows:- Situation: the sequence begins with a situation that is emotionally relevant.
- Attention: attention is directed towards the emotional situation.
- Appraisal: the emotional situation is evaluated and interpreted.
- Response: an emotional response is generated, giving rise to loosely coordinated changes in experiential, behavioral, and physiological response systems.
The process model contends that each of these four points in the emotion generation process can be subjected to regulation. From this conceptualization, the process model posits five different families of emotion regulation that correspond to the regulation of a particular point in the emotion generation process. They occur in the following order:
- Situation selection
- Situation modification
- Attentional deployment
- Cognitive change
- Response modulation
Strategies
Situation selection
Situation selection is an emotional regulation strategy that involves choosing to avoid or approach a future emotional situation. If a person selects to avoid or disengage from an emotionally relevant situation, they are decreasing the likelihood of experiencing an emotion. Alternatively, if a person selects to approach or engage with an emotionally relevant situation, they are increasing the likelihood of experiencing an emotion.Typical examples of situation selection may be seen interpersonally, such as when a parent removes his or her child from an emotionally unpleasant situation. Use of situation selection may also be seen in psychopathology. For example, avoidance of social situations to regulate emotions is particularly pronounced for those with social anxiety disorder and avoidant personality disorder.
Effective situation selection is not always an easy task. For instance, humans display difficulties predicting their emotional responses to future events. Therefore, they may have trouble making accurate and appropriate decisions about which emotionally relevant situations to approach or to avoid.
Situation modification
Situation modification involves efforts to modify a situation so as to change its emotional impact. Situation modification refers specifically to altering one's external, physical environment. Altering one's "internal" environment to regulate emotion is called cognitive change. Younger and older adults seem to also regulate their emotions through situation modification in differing ways that reflects what type of material they consume ranging from negative, neutral, and positive. Livingstone and Isaacowitz conducted research where they observed younger and older adults as they viewed different types of material and had the choice to skip what material they saw, and it came out that older adults are better able to regulate the negative material, focusing mainly on the positive, than the younger adults who still consumed positive material, but not as much modification. This showing that as we age, we gain a better understanding of situation modification and being able to emotionally self-regulate. Beyond individual situational strategies, structured psychotherapeutic approaches such as cognitive-behavioral therapy have demonstrated effectiveness in improving emotion regulation by targeting maladaptive cognitive patterns and enhancing coping skills.Examples of situation modification may include injecting humor into a speech to elicit laughter or extending the physical distance between oneself and another person.
Attentional deployment
Attentional deployment involves directing one's attention towards or away from an emotional situation.Distraction
, an example of attentional deployment, is an early selection strategy, which involves diverting one's attention away from an emotional stimulus and towards other content. Distraction has been shown to reduce the intensity of painful and emotional experiences, to decrease facial responding and neural activation in the amygdala associated with emotion, as well as to alleviate emotional distress. As opposed to [|reappraisal], individuals show a relative preference to engage in distraction when facing stimuli of high negative emotional intensity. This is because distraction easily filters out high-intensity emotional content, which would otherwise be relatively difficult to appraise and process.Rumination
, an example of attentional deployment, is defined as the passive and repetitive focusing of one's attention on one's symptoms of distress and the causes and consequences of these symptoms. Rumination is generally considered a maladaptive emotion regulation strategy, as it tends to exacerbate emotional distress. It has also been implicated in a host of disorders including major depression.Worry
, an example of attentional deployment, involves directing attention to thoughts and images concerned with potentially negative events in the future. By focusing on these events, worrying serves to aid in the down-regulation of intense negative emotion and physiological activity. While worry may sometimes involve problem solving, incessant worry is generally considered maladaptive, being a common feature of anxiety disorders, particularly generalized anxiety disorder.Thought suppression
Thought suppression, an example of attentional deployment, involves efforts to redirect one's attention from specific thoughts and mental images to other content so as to modify one's emotional state. Although thought suppression may provide temporary relief from undesirable thoughts, it may ironically end up spurring the production of even more unwanted thoughts. This strategy is generally considered maladaptive, being most associated with obsessive-compulsive disorder.Cognitive change
Cognitive change involves changing how one appraises a situation so as to alter its emotional meaning.Reappraisal
Reappraisal, an example of cognitive change, is a late selection strategy, which involves a change of the meaning of an event that alters its emotional impact. It encompasses different substrategies, such as positive reappraisal, decentering, or fictional reappraisal. Reappraisal has been shown to effectively reduce physiological, subjective, and neural emotional responding. As opposed to distraction, individuals show a relative preference to engage in reappraisal when facing stimuli of low negative emotional intensity because these stimuli are relatively easy to appraise and process.Reappraisal is generally considered to be an adaptive emotion regulation strategy. Compared to suppression, which is positively correlated with many psychological disorders, reappraisal can be associated with better interpersonal outcomes, and can be positively related to well-being. However, some researchers argue that context is important when evaluating the adaptiveness of a strategy, suggesting that in some contexts reappraisal may be maladaptive. Furthermore, some research has shown reappraisal does not influence or affect physiological responses to recurrent stress.