The psychology of emotion regulation: An integrative review

Abstract

The present article reviews modern research on the psychology of emotion regulation. Emotion regulation determines the offset of emotional responding and is thus distinct from emotional sensitivity, which determines the onset of emotional responding. Among the most viable categories for classifying emotion-regulation strategies are the targets and functions of emotion regulation. The emotion-generating systems that are targeted in emotion regulation include attention, knowledge, and bodily responses. The functions of emotion regulation include satisfying hedonic needs, supporting specific goal pursuits, and facilitating the global personality system. Emotion-regulation strategies are classified in terms of their targets and functions and relevant empirical work is reviewed. Throughout this review, emotion regulation emerges as one of the most far-ranging and influential processes at the interface of cognition and emotion.

Keywords:

• Emotion regulation
• Affect regulation
• Self-regulation
• Coping
• Psychological defence

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Jan de Houwer, Daniel Fockenberg, Miguel Kazén, Julius Kuhl, Klaus Rothermund, Hester Ruigendijk, Markus Quirin, Lotte van Dillen, and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful feedback on a previous version of this paper.

Notes

¹The literature on repressive coping has reported some positive effects on health (e.g., Coifman, Bonanno, Ray, & Gross, 2007). However, this research used affective–autonomic response discrepancy (AARD) as an index of repressive coping. With the AARD measure, repressors are those who report low levels of negative affect following threat while simultaneously displaying high levels of physiological activity, such as elevated heart rate or skin conductance. An important problem of this index is that the underlying physiological measures are not informative about emotional valence. Thus, high AARD scores could be due to unreported negative emotion or unreported positive emotion. To the extent that AARD scores are driven by unreported positive emotion, this measure may index counter-regulation processes (Rothermund et al., 2008) rather than repressive coping. Because of this ambiguity, the present review only considers the results for the more conventional self-report measure of repressive coping.