Emotion Regulation: Research on How People Manage Their Emotional Lives

Emotion regulation refers to the processes by which individuals influence which emotions they have, when they have them, and how they experience and express them. Research on emotion regulation has expanded dramatically over the past three decades, spanning developmental psychology, clinical psychology, neuroscience, and social psychology. Understanding how people regulate their emotions, which strategies are most effective, and how regulatory capacity develops and can break down has significant implications for mental health treatment, developmental practice, and everyday wellbeing. James Gross's process model of emotion regulation, introduced in the 1990s and elaborated over subsequent decades, provides a widely used framework for organizing research in this area. The model distinguishes emotion regulation strategies based on where they intervene in the temporal unfolding of an emotional episode: situation selection, which involves choosing to enter or avoid situations that will produce particular emotions; situation modification, which involves changing situations to alter their emotional impact; attentional deployment, which involves focusing attention on different aspects of a situation; cognitive change, which involves reappraising a situation's meaning; and response modulation, which involves influencing emotional responses once they have already occurred. Cognitive reappraisal, a form of cognitive change in which individuals reinterpret the meaning of a situation to alter its emotional impact, is the most extensively studied emotion regulation strategy and has the most consistent evidence of effectiveness and psychological benefit. Research comparing reappraisal to suppression, which involves inhibiting emotional expression, finds that reappraisal reduces negative emotion, maintains more positive affect, and is associated with better social relationships, wellbeing, and mental health outcomes than suppression. Neuroscience research using functional neuroimaging finds that reappraisal engages prefrontal cortical regions associated with cognitive control while reducing amygdala activity, consistent with the model that reappraisal involves top-down modulation of emotional responding. Individual differences in emotion regulation are large and meaningful. Research finds that people who habitually use adaptive strategies like reappraisal show better mental health outcomes, more positive social relationships, and better performance on cognitively demanding tasks than those who habitually rely on maladaptive strategies like rumination and suppression. Dispositional emotion regulation ability, measured through questionnaires and laboratory tasks, predicts outcomes including depression, anxiety, interpersonal functioning, and academic and occupational performance, suggesting that emotion regulation capacity is a significant individual difference with broad life consequences. Development of emotion regulation is a major theme in developmental psychology. Research on how emotion regulation develops from infancy through adolescence documents the gradual internalization of regulatory strategies that begins with external regulation by caregivers and progresses toward increasing self-regulation as children mature. The prefrontal cortex, which supports many cognitive emotion regulation strategies, is among the latest-developing brain regions, reaching full maturity in the mid-twenties, which has implications for adolescent emotion regulation capacity and the tendency toward emotional intensity and impulsivity that characterizes this developmental period. Deficits in emotion regulation are central to many mental health conditions. Borderline personality disorder is characterized by pervasive difficulties with emotion regulation, manifesting as intense emotional reactivity, rapid mood shifts, and maladaptive regulatory attempts including self-harm. Depression involves regulatory profiles characterized by rumination and reduced positive emotional engagement. Anxiety involves heightened fear responses and avoidance that represents an unsuccessful attempt to regulate negative emotion. Dialectical behavior therapy, developed by Marsha Linehan specifically for borderline personality disorder, includes explicit emotion regulation skills training and has demonstrated effectiveness in reducing self-harm and improving emotional functioning. Cultural differences in emotion regulation have been documented in cross-cultural research. Studies comparing East Asian and Western participants on emotion regulation frequency and effectiveness find that suppression is more commonly used in East Asian cultural contexts and is associated with less negative outcome in these contexts than in Western ones, suggesting that the effectiveness of different strategies is moderated by cultural norms about emotional expression. Research on cultural variation in emotion regulation challenges the assumption that regulatory strategies identified as optimal in Western research are universally so. Regulatory depletion, the idea that emotion regulation consumes limited cognitive resources that can be exhausted, was a prominent research area following ego depletion studies suggesting that self-control is a limited resource. Subsequent attempts to replicate ego depletion effects have produced inconsistent results, and the original resource model is now debated. More nuanced accounts of regulatory costs emphasize that demanding regulatory contexts reduce regulatory quality through motivation and opportunity effects rather than through simple resource depletion. The research on emotion regulation has clear clinical implications: helping people develop more flexible and effective regulatory repertoires is a productive target for therapeutic intervention, and many evidence-based therapies for emotional disorders either directly train regulatory skills or implicitly build regulatory capacity through exposure and cognitive restructuring. The science of emotion regulation also has implications for education, workplace design, and policy contexts in which managing emotional responses is a relevant capacity.