Guest editors James Gross and Kateri McRae share key takeaways from the February 2020 special issue of Emotion, which introduces the current research focus on emotion regulation. The issue is particularly relevant to how people are dealing with their emotions during the COVID-19 crisis.
What is the special issue about?
This special issue focuses on emotion regulation — the processes that are engaged as people try to change one or more aspects of their emotions. Experts from around the world wrote brief articles summarizing research and theory related to definitions and theories, determinants, consequences, and mechanisms of emotion regulation, as well as interventions that involve emotion regulation.
What is the significance of the issue?
Thousands of papers are published each year on emotion regulation. These papers span clinical and affective science, social, cognitive, personality, health, and developmental psychology, as well as neuroscience, making it difficult to keep up.
The articles in this special issue reflect the current state of the science, outlining the most important influences on, and consequences of, emotion regulation. Brief, theoretically focused review articles are an excellent introduction to the current foci of empirical research. The articles in the special issue make a succinct introduction to several streams of research on this topic, suitable for assigning in an advanced undergraduate or graduate seminar course.
Emotion regulation relates to existing conceptualizations of self-regulation, cognitive control, and executive functioning. The emotion regulation strategies people use, and how well they use them, influence social functioning, academic success, and psychopathology.
Emotion regulation, in turn, is influenced by individual factors, such as personality, and contextual factors, such as relationship context and the presence of anticipatory or positive information. Mechanisms of emotion regulation include proactive and reactive processes, as well as reward learning and the up-regulation of positive emotion.
Several interventions promise to improve emotion regulation in the short and long term.
Tell us about a few key takeaways.
- Emotion regulation can be used to change our own or others' emotions.
- Emotion regulation has social, emotional, academic, and cognitive consequences.
- Emotion regulation is a motivated process; our use of different emotion regulation strategies relates strongly to our goals.
- Generally adaptive emotion regulation strategies, such as cognitive reappraisal, may have long-lasting effects on how our brains and bodies respond to emotional situations.
- In addition to psychological interventions, intervention in the brain (such as neurofeedback) may be one way to shape and strengthen neural systems that support adaptive emotion regulation.
What are some practical implications of the articles featured in the issue?
Our emotional responses help define who we are and how we relate to others around us. Emotion dysregulation is a defining feature of many clinical disorders, and a number of treatments for clinical disorders (as well as interventions to improve wellbeing and health in nonclinical populations) feature interventions that directly attempt to improve how well and how often people are able to regulate their emotions.
These insights are especially relevant in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting drastic changes to our emotional, economic, and social lives. The ways we attempt to change how we are thinking and feeling about our new situations have the potential to make the difference between responding to the crisis with overwhelming panic and anxiety or rising to the challenge.
For example, the degree to which individuals generally judge stress (and their own stress responses) to be helpful or harmful can make the difference between defeat and successful engagement.
Note: This article is in the Social Psychology and Social Processes topic area. View more articles in the Social Psychology and Social Processes topic area.