Putting emotion regulation in context

doi:10.1016/j.copsyc.2015.03.022

Current Opinion in Psychology

Volume 3, June 2015, Pages 100-107

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2015.03.022 Get rights and content

Highlights

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We review the 19 articles included in this Special Issue on emotion regulation.
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We do so by focusing on the role that context plays in this process.
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We suggest directions for future research.

In this commentary, we discuss the 19 review articles that encompass this Special Issue of Current Opinion in Psychology on the topic of Emotion Regulation. Given the growing recognition of the importance of contextual factors in determining how emotions are experienced and regulated (1), we adopt a contextual framework to organize our commentary. To that end, we discuss how each of the topics covered in the articles fit within the four contextual components of emotion regulation: (1) characteristics of the organism carrying out the regulation; (2) features of the emotion-eliciting stimuli and/or situations; (3) implementation of regulatory processes; and (4) types of outcomes. We then provide recommendations for future research. We hope that this Special Issue, and the future directions discussed in this commentary, can stimulate further research in the already fast growing area of emotion regulation and context.

Section snippets

Developmental stage

One of the major contextual dimensions that play a role in how emotions are experienced and regulated is developmental stage (e.g. [7, 8, 9]). In this respect, Kiel and Kalomiris (this issue) reviewed the literature on parental influences on children's emotion regulation. They discussed recent research suggesting that fathers (i.e., not just mothers) also play a significant role in the development of children's emotion regulation skills and that this contribution may become more pronounced as

Laboratory studies

Turning to examinations of the features of emotion eliciting situations, Seeley et al. (this issue) highlighted the importance of developing paradigms to maximize the external validity of laboratory-based studies. In particular, they advocated for the utilization of inductions that focus on idiographic processes, such as worry, rumination, and self-criticism. They also emphasized the importance of generating complex emotional states in the laboratory (rather than focusing on the elicitation of

Automaticity

In terms of emotion regulation implementation, Koole et al. (this issue) discussed implicit processes by introducing the action control model of emotion regulation (e.g. [23]). According to this model, emotion regulation consists of firstly, determining the need to regulate, secondly, deciding on which strategies to use, and thirdly,) implementing such strategies (for similar approaches, see [2, 3, 5]). Koole et al. (this issue) suggested that implicit processes have a powerful impact on each

Short-term versus long-term emotional and behavioral outcomes

To date, the majority of studies on emotion regulation have focused on changes in subjective experience, physiological arousal, neural activity, and expressive behavior (e.g. [1]). As a result, very little is known about the effects of this process on goal-driven motivated behaviors. This is problematic because the enactment of certain behaviors can hinder individuals’ adaptation to the environment. In fact, dysregulated behaviors are central to most mental disorders [32, 33, 34]. Weiss et al. (

Conclusion

To conclude our commentary, we would like to summarize the key future directions we discussed. First, we emphasized the importance of clearly conceptualizing the distinction between emotion regulation abilities and strategies and of delineating their bidirectional relationship over the course of development. Second, we highlighted the central role that that interpersonal processes play in the experience and regulation of emotions. In this respect, it will be critical to systematically model

Conflict of interest

None declared.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Kara Christensen and Ilana Seager for their feedback on earlier versions of this manuscript.

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Cited by (40)

Emotion regulation strategy use in PTSD: A daily life study
2023, Journal of Affective Disorders
Posttraumatic Stress Disorder is associated with emotion regulation difficulties. However, our understanding of these difficulties has been limited by the reliance of previous work on retrospective trait self-reports, which are unable to capture dynamic, ecologically-valid use of emotion regulation strategies.
To address this issue, this study used an ecological momentary assessment (EMA) design to understand the impact of PTSD on emotion regulation in daily life. We conducted an EMA study in a trauma exposed sample with varying levels of PTSD severity (N = 70; 7 days; 423 observations).
We found that PTSD severity was linked to greater use of disengagement and perseverative-based strategies to manage negative emotions, regardless of emotional intensity.
Study design did not allow investigation into the temporal use of emotion regulation strategies and small sample size.
This pattern of responding to emotions may interfere with engaging with the fear structure and thus impair emotion processing in current frontline treatments; clinical implications are discussed.
Assessing parental emotion regulation in the context of parenting: A systematic review
2023, Developmental Review
Despite a need for developmental and clinical research to understand how parents regulate their emotions in the context of parent–child interaction, empirical studies of parental emotion regulation (ER) have predominantly relied on general models and measures of adult ER. To address this gap, the present systematic review aimed to identify studies that examined parental ER in the context of parenting, and to evaluate how ER was defined and operationalized, how specific measurement contexts were established, what types of methods were involved, and the state of evidence on their reliability and validity. A systematic search in five databases yielded 91 studies that adopted assessments capturing different facets and processes of parental ER, highlighting the importance of conceptual clarity in integrating empirical findings and developing new research. Results also suggested that most studies relied on a single method or source to assess parental ER, and further evidence is needed to support the reliability and validity of many measures. Compared to general measures of adult ER, the assessments identified in this review were situated within the recollection of past parenting experiences and real-time actual or hypothetical parenting situations, allowing researchers to capture parenting demands and accommodate developmental characteristics in parent–child relationships. This review presents a toolbox for researchers interested in examining parental ER as context-specific processes and provides recommendations to move the field in a more conceptually sound and methodologically rigorous direction.
Effortful control and depression in school-age children: The chain mediating role of emotion regulation ability and cognitive reappraisal strategy
2023, Journal of Affective Disorders
Depression is one of the main mental health problems facing primary school students. Temperamental effortful control (EC) has received much attention as a protective factor to depression. The present study aimed to verify the association of effortful control and children's depression and explore the mediating roles of emotion regulation ability (ERA) and strategies (ERSs) in the relationship.
A total of 449 valid primary school students in grades 3 to 6 were included in the study. Self-report and parent-report questionnaires were used to collect data on key variables, including EC, depression, ERA and ERSs.
Gender and whether-native-or-not had significant effects on children's depression. EC was significantly and negatively correlated with children's depression; EC and depression were significantly correlated with Emotion Regulation dimension of ERA and cognitive reappraisal; but there was no correlation between EC and Lability/Negativity, as well as between expression suppression and depression. EmotionRegulation and cognitive reappraisal played mediating effects in the relationship between EC and depression parallelly and sequentially.
The study used cross-sectional design and the sample was restricted to Chinese primary school students. Additionally, the types and research perspectives of ERSs can be further expanded.
EC can reduce the level of children's depression by improving the abilities of Emotion Regulation and the use of cognitive reappraisal strategy, as well as the chain mediating effects of the two.
Alexithymia and emotion regulation
2023, Journal of Affective Disorders
Citation Excerpt :
At the identification stage, people high in alexithymia should likely be making poorer decisions about whether and how to regulate their emotions. This is important because contexts differ in terms of whether emotion regulation is needed, or whether such regulation should involve the down- or up-regulation of emotion (e.g., Aldao and Tull, 2015). At the selection stage, people high in alexithymia should likely be worse at selecting adaptive strategies optimally suited to their needs.
Alexithymia is a key transdiagnostic risk factor for emotion-based psychopathologies. Conceptual models specify that this is because alexithymia impairs emotion regulation. However, the extent of these putative emotion regulation impairments remains underexplored. Our aim in this study was to begin to address this gap by examining whether people with high, average, or low levels of alexithymia differ in the types of emotion regulation strategies they typically use.
General community adults from the United States (N = 501) completed a battery of alexithymia and emotion regulation measures. Participants were grouped into high, average, and low alexithymia quantiles.
After controlling for demographics and current levels of distress, the high, average, and low alexithymia groups differed in their use of cognitive and behavioral emotion regulation strategies. Compared to the other groups, the high alexithymia group reported lesser use of generally adaptive regulation strategies (cognitive reappraisal, approaching problems, and seeking social support) and greater use of generally maladaptive regulation strategies (expressive suppression, behavioral withdrawal, ignoring).
Our data were cross-sectional and from self-report questionnaires. Future work in other cultural groups would be beneficial.
Our results support the view that alexithymia is associated with impaired emotion regulation. In particular, people with high alexithymia seem to exhibit a less adaptive profile of emotion regulation strategies. Direct targeting of these emotion regulation patterns in psychotherapy may therefore be a useful pathway for the treatment of emotional disorder symptoms in people with high alexithymia.
Reappraisal and empathic perspective-taking – More alike than meets the eyes
2022, NeuroImage
Citation Excerpt :
The use of emotion regulation and empathy are context-dependent (Aldao and Tull, 2015; Gonzalez-Liencres et al., 2013). Characteristics of individuals (e.g., personality traits, experience, age, etc.), the specific emotion involved, as well as the context in which an interaction occurs between individuals, will influence which processes are implemented and what are the emotional and behavioral outcomes (Aldao and Tull, 2015; Zaki, 2014). In addition, emotion regulation and empathy are motivated phenomena; an observer or an agent is driven to reduce or intensify empathy or emotional responses (Tamir et al., 2020; Zaki, 2014).
Emotion regulation and empathy represent highly intertwined psychological processes sharing common conceptual ground. Despite the wealth of research in these fields, the joint and distinct functional nature and topological features of these constructs have not yet been investigated using the same experimental approach. This study investigated the common and distinct neural correlates of emotion regulation and empathy using a meta-analytic approach. The regions that were jointly activated were then characterized using meta-analytic connectivity modeling and functional decoding of metadata terms. The results revealed convergent activity within the ventrolateral and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex as well as temporal regions. The functional decoding analysis demonstrated that emotion regulation and empathy were related to highly similar executive and internally oriented processes. This synthesis underlining strong functional and neuronal correspondence between emotion regulation and empathy could (i) facilitate greater integration of these two separate lines of literature, (ii) accelerate progress toward elucidating the neural mechanisms that support social cognition, and (iii) push forward the development of a common theoretical framework for these psychological processes essential to human social interactions.
Influence of suppression and reappraisal on eating-related symptoms and ruminative thinking in anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa
2021, Behaviour Research and Therapy
Citation Excerpt :
A replication of the results via the EMA method would therefore be desirable. It is crucial to mention that new research points to the functionality of ER strategies as being determined by situational context as well as an individual ’s personal goal and values (Aldao, 2013; Aldao & Tull, 2015). In light of this, ER strategies such as expressive suppression may be regarded as useful in specific situations that call for it (e.g., job interviews).
The goal of the present study was to investigate the influence of expressive suppression and cognitive reappraisal on eating-related symptomatology in anorexia nervosa (AN) and bulimia nervosa (BN). Secondly, on the background of theoretical models proposing a reciprocal relationship between suppression and rumination, we sought to understand whether inhibition of emotional expression also affects ruminative thinking in eating disorders.
Women with AN (n = 39), BN (n = 37) and a control group (CG, n = 41) were randomly assigned to either engage in suppression or reappraisal during a sadness-eliciting film clip. Levels of drive to eat, anticipated loss of control over eating and ruminative thoughts were rated before and after the induction of emotion regulation.
Induced expressive suppression led to a decrease of reported drive to eat in AN and an increase of anticipated loss of control over eating in BN. All groups responded to suppression with greater rumination, whereas no significant changes were found for reappraisal. Mediation analyses on trait questionnaires pointed to rumination as a partial mediator of the correlation between suppression and eating disorder pathology.
Results are discussed in line with recent empirical research and current emotion regulation theories.

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View full text

Putting emotion regulation in context

Highlights

Section snippets

Developmental stage

Laboratory studies

Automaticity

Short-term versus long-term emotional and behavioral outcomes

Conclusion

Conflict of interest

Acknowledgements

Clin Psychol Rev

Clin Psychol Rev

Biol Psychiat

J Psychiat Res

Behav Ther

Neurosci Biobehav Rev

The future of emotion regulation research capturing context

Pers Psychol Sci

Regulatory flexibility an individual differences perspective on coping and emotion regulation

Pers Psychol Sci

Multidimensional assessment of emotion regulation and dysregulation: Development, factor structure, and initial validation of the difficulties in emotion regulation scale

J Psychopathol Behav Assess

Emotion regulation: current status and future prospects

Psychol Inq

Moving ahead in the study of the development of emotion regulation

Int J Behav Dev

The relations of regulation and emotionality to children's externalizing and internalizing problem behavior

Child Dev

New directions in developmental emotion regulation research across the life span: Introduction to the special section

Int J Behav Dev

Temporal interpersonal emotion systems: the ‘TIES’ that form relationships

Pers Soc Psychol B

Interpersonal emotion regulation model of mood and anxiety disorders

Cogn Ther Res

Interpersonal emotion regulation

Emot