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What is Emotion Regulation?

The processes by which people influence which emotions they have, when they have them, and how they experience and express them — a capacity that develops through childhood and predicts mental health across the lifespan.

From the PsychologyOrbit knowledge base, last updated 2 November 2026.

Knowledge base Updated 2 November 2026 1 views

Emotion Regulation

The processes by which people influence which emotions they have, when they have them, and how they experience and express them — a capacity that develops through childhood and predicts mental health across the lifespan.

Definition

Gross's process model organises strategies by where they act in the emotion-generative sequence:

  • Situation selection: choosing or avoiding situations.
  • Situation modification: changing the situation.
  • Attentional deployment: distraction, concentration, rumination.
  • Cognitive change: reappraisal.
  • Response modulation: suppression, substance use, exercise.

Earlier strategies are generally more efficient because they act before the emotional response is fully generated.

History

The construct draws on coping research, on developmental work on temperament and self-regulation, and on psychoanalytic work on defence. Gross's process model, from the late 1990s, gave the field a common structure.

Developmentally, regulation begins as co-regulation: an infant's state is regulated by a caregiver before it can be regulated internally, which links this literature directly to attachment.

Theory

The most durable empirical contrast is between reappraisal — changing the meaning of a situation — and expressive suppression — inhibiting the outward display of an emotion already underway.

Reappraisal reduces negative affect with little physiological cost. Suppression reduces expression without reducing the felt emotion, increases physiological arousal, impairs memory for the event, and costs the other person in a conversation.

The important correction to this is regulatory flexibility: no strategy is good in itself. Suppression is adaptive where expression is unsafe, and reappraisal is maladaptive where the situation genuinely warrants distress and could be changed instead. The predictor of good outcomes is matching strategy to context, not preferring one strategy.

Research

Difficulties in regulation are transdiagnostic. They appear across depression, anxiety, PTSD, eating disorders, substance use and personality disorder, which is part of the argument for transdiagnostic treatment models.

Rumination is the most consistently harmful strategy in the literature, prospectively predicting depression onset, and it is often mistaken by the person doing it for problem solving.

Cultural variation is substantial. The costs of suppression documented in Western samples are smaller or absent in samples where emotional restraint is normative, which shows the harm is at least partly about mismatch with context rather than about the strategy alone.

Applications

It is the explicit target of dialectical behaviour therapy, emotion-focused therapy, and the unified protocol, and an implicit target of most other psychotherapies.

Also applied in parenting programmes, school social-emotional learning, and occupational settings where emotional labour is part of the role.

Criticism

  • The construct is very broad, overlapping coping, self-control and mindfulness to the point where discriminant validity is unclear.
  • Measurement is mostly self-report and requires the very insight that dysregulation impairs.
  • The reappraisal-is-good conclusion was overgeneralised before the flexibility literature corrected it.
  • Cultural norms are frequently ignored, and strategies that are adaptive in one setting are labelled dysfunctional when carried into another.
  • Regulation can be prescribed as a substitute for changing the situation, which is a political move disguised as a clinical one.

References

  • Gross, J. J. (1998). The emerging field of emotion regulation. Review of General Psychology, 2(3), 271-299.
  • Gross, J. J., & John, O. P. (2003). Individual differences in two emotion regulation processes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(2), 348-362.
  • Aldao, A., Nolen-Hoeksema, S., & Schweizer, S. (2010). Emotion-regulation strategies across psychopathology: A meta-analytic review. Clinical Psychology Review, 30(2), 217-237.
  • Bonanno, G. A., & Burton, C. L. (2013). Regulatory flexibility. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 8(6), 591-612.
Written for PsychologyOrbit and reviewed before publishing. It is a summary for professionals and students, not clinical guidance, and it is not a substitute for the primary sources listed above.