Emotional Regulation

Abstract

Emotional regulation, which MeSH classifies under emotions, is the set of processes by which people influence which emotions they have, when they have them, and how they experience and express them. This article is organized around James Gross's process model, which locates regulation at five points in the emotion-generative sequence — situation selection, situation modification, attentional deployment, cognitive change, and response modulation — and contrasts its two most studied strategies, antecedent-focused cognitive reappraisal and response-focused expressive suppression. It reviews the neural basis of the cognitive control of emotion, the measurement of regulation with the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire and the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale, regulatory flexibility, and the links between regulation and psychopathology. Three interactive demonstrations explore the process model's timeline, the divergent effects of reappraisal and suppression, and matching strategy to context.

Keywords: emotional regulation, process model, cognitive reappraisal, expressive suppression, regulatory flexibility

Emotional regulation refers to the processes by which people influence which emotions they have, when they have them, and how those emotions are experienced and expressed (Gross, 1998). The definition is deliberately broad: it covers deliberate, effortful strategies such as talking oneself out of anger, and automatic, unconscious ones such as habitually looking away from something upsetting; it covers the down-regulation of negative emotion and the up-regulation of positive emotion; and it applies whether a person is managing their own feelings (intrinsic regulation) or another's (extrinsic regulation, as when a parent soothes a child). What unites these cases is that an emotion is being modulated rather than simply generated (Gross, 2015).

The construct earned a definition only gradually. Ross Thompson's influential developmental account described emotion regulation as the extrinsic and intrinsic processes responsible for monitoring, evaluating, and modifying emotional reactions, especially their intensive and temporal features, to accomplish one's goals (Thompson, 1994). Thompson's emphasis on goals is important: regulation is not the same as suppression or control, because the goal may be to intensify, prolong, or simply maintain an emotion, not only to dampen it. What makes a process regulatory is that it is recruited in the service of a goal about the emotion itself (Gross, 2015).

The Process Model of Emotion Regulation

The organizing framework for the field is James Gross's process model, which locates regulation within the emotion-generative process itself (Gross, 1998; Gross, 2015). An emotion, on this view, unfolds as a sequence: a situation arises (real or imagined), draws attention, is appraised for its meaning relative to one's goals, and produces a coordinated experiential, behavioral, and physiological response. Because the response then often changes the situation, the sequence is recursive rather than strictly linear. The model's central claim is that regulation can enter at any point in this sequence, and that where it enters matters.

Five families of strategies follow from the five points of entry. Situation selection is choosing whether to enter or avoid an emotion-eliciting situation in the first place — declining an invitation that would provoke anxiety. Situation modification is altering a situation one is already in to change its emotional impact — changing the subject of a tense conversation. Attentional deployment is directing attention within a situation, through distraction or concentration, to influence what one feels. Cognitive change is altering how one appraises a situation to change its meaning, of which reappraisal is the best-studied instance. Response modulation is influencing the emotional response after it is under way, of which expressive suppression is the best-studied instance (Gross, 1998; Koole, 2009). The first demonstration lets the reader move along this timeline and see which strategies remain available as an emotion unfolds.

The crucial distinction the model draws is between antecedent-focused strategies, which act on the input to the emotion system before the response is fully generated (the first four families), and response-focused strategies, which act on the output once it is under way (the fifth). This timing distinction turns out to have large consequences, because intervening early, while an emotion is still forming, is generally more effective and less costly than intervening late, once it has already been generated (Gross, 2015).

Drag the marker along the emotion-generative sequence. As the emotion unfolds, earlier strategy families close off; only response modulation remains once the response is under way.

The first four families are antecedent-focused — they act before the emotional response is complete — while response modulation acts after. Once the response is under way, only response-focused strategies such as expressive suppression remain (Gross, 1998; Koole, 2009).

Reappraisal and Suppression

Two strategies have received far more study than the rest, one from each side of the antecedent/response divide. Cognitive reappraisal is a form of cognitive change: it involves construing a potentially emotion-eliciting situation in a way that alters its emotional impact, such as viewing a frightening event as an opportunity or a rejection as a redirection. Expressive suppression is a form of response modulation: it involves inhibiting the outward, behavioral signs of an emotion that is already under way, keeping a neutral face while feeling upset (Gross & John, 2003).

Their consequences diverge sharply, and the divergence is the model's signature finding. In a classic experiment, Gross and Levenson had participants watch a disgusting film while either suppressing their expressions or watching normally; suppression successfully reduced expressive behavior but left the subjective experience of disgust intact and increased sympathetic nervous system activation — a physiological cost of holding the response in (Gross & Levenson, 1993). Reappraisal, by contrast, intervenes earlier and reshapes the emotion at its source: it reduces the experience and expression of negative emotion together, without the physiological cost, and without impairing memory for the situation (Gross, 1998). The second demonstration contrasts the two, showing how suppression narrows the gap between felt and shown emotion only by paying in arousal, while reappraisal lowers experience, expression, and arousal together.

These acute laboratory effects extend to stable individual differences. Using the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire, Gross and John found that people who habitually reappraise report more positive and less negative emotion, better interpersonal functioning, and higher well-being, whereas habitual suppressors report the opposite pattern, along with a sense of inauthenticity from masking their feelings (Gross & John, 2003). A large meta-analysis of experimental studies confirmed the ranking at the level of causal effect: reappraisal reliably produces the intended changes in emotional outcomes, while suppression is markedly less effective and can be counterproductive (Webb et al., 2012).

Both are “regulation,” but they enter the sequence at different points and leave opposite physiological signatures. Switch strategies and watch the three components move.

Full response: all three components sit at the baseline of 70.

Values are a schematic model of the empirical pattern reported by Gross and Levenson (1993) and Gross (1998): antecedent-focused reappraisal lowers the whole response, while response-focused suppression cuts only the outward signal and pays for it in arousal.

The Neural Bases of Regulation

The idea that emotion can be reshaped by changing how a situation is construed invites a neural question: how does the reasoning brain influence the feeling brain? The dominant answer describes a cognitive control of emotion in which prefrontal and cingulate regions associated with cognitive control modulate activity in subcortical and cortical regions that generate affective responses, chief among them the amygdala (Ochsner & Gross, 2005). On this account reappraisal recruits lateral and medial prefrontal cortex and posterior parietal regions — the same machinery of executive function engaged by working memory and selective attention — to construct and hold in mind an alternative appraisal, which in turn dampens amygdala responding.

A meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies of reappraisal by Buhle and colleagues confirmed the core of this picture: reappraisal reliably engages prefrontal and parietal control regions and is associated with modulation of the amygdala, though the amygdala effect can be up- or down-regulation depending on the regulatory goal (Buhle et al., 2014). A broader synthesis by Etkin, Büchel, and Gross mapped the field onto the stages of the process model, distinguishing the circuitry of explicit, effortful regulation from that of more implicit, automatic forms and arguing that different regulation strategies recruit partly distinct neural systems rather than a single control network (Etkin et al., 2015). This neural work grounds the behavioral claim that regulation is not a unitary faculty but a family of processes, each with its own mechanism (Braunstein et al., 2017).

Measurement, Flexibility, and Psychopathology

Emotion regulation became a research outcome once it could be measured. Two self-report instruments dominate. The Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ) scores the two habitual strategies, reappraisal and suppression, as independent trait dimensions (Gross & John, 2003). The Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS) takes the complementary approach of indexing regulation failure, across facets such as non-acceptance of emotional responses, difficulty engaging in goal-directed behavior when distressed, impulse-control difficulties, limited access to strategies, and lack of emotional clarity (Gratz & Roemer, 2004). A meta-analytic mapping of the many strategies people report suggests they organize into a smaller number of families with characteristic adaptive or maladaptive profiles (Naragon-Gainey et al., 2017).

A recurring lesson from this measurement work is that no strategy is uniformly good or bad. What distinguishes effective regulation is regulatory flexibility: the capacity to read the demands of a context, select a strategy that fits, monitor its effect, and switch when it is not working (Bonanno & Burton, 2013). Gal Sheppes and colleagues showed the point experimentally, finding that people tend to choose distraction for high-intensity emotional situations and reappraisal for low-intensity ones — a sensible matching, since reappraisal is harder to deploy against an intense stimulus (Sheppes et al., 2015). Even suppression, generally the costlier strategy, can be adaptive in contexts that call for it. The third demonstration makes this concrete, rewarding strategy-to-context matches over rigid reliance on any single strategy.

No strategy is best everywhere. Read each situation and choose the strategy that fits it. Flexibility — not loyalty to one favorite — is what scores.

The reward tracks strategy-to-context fit, not a single “best” strategy — the experimental signature of regulatory flexibility (Bonanno & Burton, 2013; Sheppes et al., 2015).

This flexibility framing reshaped the clinical picture. A meta-analysis by Aldao, Nolen-Hoeksema, and Schweizer found that certain strategies — rumination, avoidance, and suppression — are broadly associated with psychopathology across anxiety, depression, eating, and substance-use disorders, while reappraisal and problem solving are weakly protective (Aldao et al., 2010). Sheppes, Suri, and Gross drew the wider conclusion that emotion dysregulation is a transdiagnostic feature of mental disorder, and that the process model offers a common framework for locating where, in the emotion-generative sequence, a given disorder's regulation goes wrong (Sheppes et al., 2015). Developmentally, the same regulatory capacities emerge in childhood and their measurement raises distinctive methodological challenges, since emotion and its regulation are difficult to separate in a young child's behavior (Cole et al., 2004).

Worked Example

The process model's signature prediction is that antecedent-focused reappraisal and response-focused suppression have different effects on the components of an emotional response, because they enter the sequence at different points. Make the claim arithmetic. Represent an emotional response by three components on a 0–100 scale — subjective experience, outward expression, and physiological arousal — and take an unregulated negative emotion that sets all three to 70. Model each strategy as a set of multipliers on the unregulated baseline, following the empirical pattern established by Gross and Levenson (Gross & Levenson, 1993; Gross, 1998).

Reappraisal intervenes early, reshaping the emotion before the response is fully generated, so it lowers all three components: multiply experience and expression by 0.5 and physiology by 0.6, giving experience = 70 × 0.5 = 35, expression = 70 × 0.5 = 35, and physiology = 70 × 0.6 = 42. Suppression intervenes late, inhibiting only the outward response, so it cuts expression sharply but leaves experience nearly untouched and raises arousal from the effort of holding the response in: multiply expression by 0.4, experience by 0.95, and physiology by 1.3, giving expression = 70 × 0.4 = 28, experience = 70 × 0.95 = 67 (rounded), and physiology = 70 × 1.3 = 91.

The two strategies produce almost opposite physiological signatures despite both being called “regulation.” Reappraisal leaves the person feeling and showing less while their body settles; suppression leaves them showing less while feeling nearly as much and their body working harder. The arithmetic makes visible why the timing of an intervention, not merely its presence, is what the process model treats as decisive (Gross, 2015; Webb et al., 2012).

Discussion

Emotional regulation has matured from a loosely used term into one of affective science's most productive frameworks, and the process model is the reason. By locating regulation within the emotion-generative sequence, the model turned an open-ended list of coping behaviors into a principled taxonomy of five strategy families defined by where they act, and it derived from that taxonomy the field's most robust empirical contrast: the divergent profiles of antecedent-focused reappraisal and response-focused suppression (Gross, 1998; Gross & John, 2003; Webb et al., 2012). The model also unified levels of analysis, giving neuroscientists a map on which to place the prefrontal-amygdala circuitry of cognitive control and clinicians a scheme for locating the regulatory failures common to many disorders (Ochsner & Gross, 2005; Sheppes et al., 2015).

The field's own corrective has been the move from ranking strategies to studying their fit. The early lesson that reappraisal is “good” and suppression “bad” has been tempered by the recognition that effectiveness is contextual, and that the hallmark of healthy regulation is flexibility — deploying the strategy a situation calls for and abandoning one that is not working (Bonanno & Burton, 2013; Aldao et al., 2010). This shift matters practically: interventions that teach a single favored strategy may help less than those that build the capacity to choose among strategies, which is the direction toward which the measurement and clinical literatures now point.

Current Directions

Contemporary work extends the process model in three directions. The first is toward implicit and automatic regulation. Much of everyday regulation happens without deliberate intent, and researchers have built a multi-level framework distinguishing explicit, effortful regulation from implicit forms that share some machinery but operate outside awareness, each mapping onto partly distinct neural systems (Braunstein et al., 2017). This reframes the field's early focus on effortful reappraisal as one case within a broader space.

The second is toward beliefs about emotion. Whether a person believes emotions are fixed or malleable, useful or dangerous, shapes which regulation strategies they attempt and how well those strategies work; emotion beliefs are increasingly treated as an upstream determinant of regulation and a target for intervention in their own right (Ford & Gross, 2019). The third is toward personalization: rather than asking which strategy is best on average, researchers are asking which strategy works for whom, under what conditions, and are building methods that match strategies to individuals and situations rather than prescribing one for all (Doré et al., 2016). A recent synthesis frames these strands as a maturing science moving from cataloguing strategies to predicting, for a given person and moment, what will actually help (McRae & Gross, 2020).

Common Misconceptions

Emotion regulation means suppressing or getting rid of emotions.

Regulation is any goal-directed influence on emotion, including up-regulating, prolonging, or maintaining an emotion. Suppression is only one strategy, and often a costly one (Gross, 2015; Gross & Levenson, 1993).

Reappraisal is always the best strategy.

Reappraisal is effective on average, but no strategy is best in every context; against very intense emotion, distraction is often chosen and works better, and healthy regulation is defined by flexibly matching strategy to situation (Sheppes et al., 2015; Bonanno & Burton, 2013).

Suppression works because it makes the feeling go away.

Expressive suppression hides the outward signs of an emotion but leaves the subjective experience largely intact and increases physiological arousal; it changes what is shown, not what is felt (Gross & Levenson, 1993; Gross & John, 2003).

Emotion regulation is a single skill a person either has or lacks.

It is a family of distinct processes recruited at different points in the emotion-generative sequence, drawing on partly separate neural systems; a person can be adept with one strategy and poor with another (Gross, 1998; Etkin et al., 2015).

Glossary

Antecedent-focused regulation.

Strategies that act on the inputs to an emotion — situation, attention, or appraisal — before the emotional response is fully generated.

Attentional deployment.

Directing attention within a situation — through distraction or concentration — to influence which emotion arises and how strongly.

Cognitive change.

Altering how a situation is appraised in order to change its emotional meaning; the family of strategies to which reappraisal belongs.

Cognitive reappraisal.

Construing a potentially emotion-eliciting situation in a way that changes its emotional impact; an antecedent-focused strategy that lowers experience, expression, and physiological cost together.

Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS).

A self-report instrument that indexes regulation failure across facets such as non-acceptance, limited strategies, and lack of emotional clarity.

Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ).

A self-report instrument scoring habitual use of cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression as independent trait dimensions.

Emotion regulation.

The set of processes by which people influence which emotions they have, when they have them, and how they experience and express them.

Expressive suppression.

Inhibiting the outward behavioral signs of an emotion already under way; a response-focused strategy that cuts expression but not experience and raises arousal.

Extrinsic emotion regulation.

Regulating another person's emotions, as when a caregiver soothes a distressed child; contrasted with intrinsic regulation of one's own.

Intrinsic emotion regulation.

Regulating one's own emotions; the more commonly studied direction, contrasted with extrinsic regulation of others' emotions.

Process model of emotion regulation.

Gross's framework locating five families of strategies at successive points in the emotion-generative sequence from situation to response.

Regulatory flexibility.

The capacity to read a context, select a fitting strategy, monitor its effect, and switch when it is not working; a marker of healthy regulation.

Response modulation.

Influencing the experiential, behavioral, or physiological components of an emotional response after it is under way; the one response-focused family in the process model.

Response-focused regulation.

Strategies that act on the emotional response once it has been generated, rather than on its antecedents.

Situation modification.

Directly altering an external situation one is already in to change its emotional impact.

Situation selection.

Choosing whether to approach or avoid an emotion-eliciting situation in the first place; the earliest point of regulation.

Valuation system.

In the extended process model, a unit that evaluates a stimulus against a goal; regulation arises when one valuation system takes another as its object.

Key Researchers

Amelia Aldao (contemporary). Clinical psychologist and founder of Together CBT, formerly of The Ohio State University; her meta-analytic work established that strategies such as rumination, avoidance, and suppression are transdiagnostically linked to psychopathology while reappraisal is weakly protective. Google Scholar

James J. Gross (contemporary). Professor of psychology at Stanford University; originator of the process model of emotion regulation and, with Oliver John, of the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire, he defined the field's central framework and its reappraisal-suppression contrast. Google Scholar - Faculty Page

Iris B. Mauss (contemporary). Professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley; her research examines the paradoxical effects of valuing and pursuing happiness and the links between emotion regulation and well-being. ORCID - Google Scholar - Faculty Page - Wikipedia - Wikidata

Kateri McRae (contemporary). Professor of psychology at the University of Denver; she studies the cognitive and neural mechanisms of reappraisal and the determinants of regulation success across individuals. ORCID - Google Scholar - Faculty Page

Susan Nolen-Hoeksema (1959-2013). Professor of psychology at Yale University; she developed the response-styles theory of rumination, identifying repetitive negative thinking as a maladaptive regulation strategy central to depression. Google Scholar - Wikipedia - Wikidata

Kevin N. Ochsner (contemporary). Professor of psychology at Columbia University; he led the cognitive-neuroscience program on the cognitive control of emotion, mapping how prefrontal regions modulate the amygdala during reappraisal. Google Scholar - Faculty Page

Gal Sheppes (contemporary). Professor of psychology at Tel Aviv University; his work on strategy selection showed that people flexibly choose distraction or reappraisal according to emotional intensity, reframing regulation as a matter of fit. Google Scholar - Faculty Page - Wikidata

Ross A. Thompson (contemporary). Distinguished professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis; his 1994 developmental definition of emotion regulation, centered on monitoring and modifying emotion in the service of goals, shaped how the field defines the construct. Google Scholar - Faculty Page - Wikipedia - Wikidata

Frequently Asked Questions

What is emotional regulation?
Emotional regulation is the set of processes by which people influence which emotions they have, when they have them, and how they experience and express them. It includes deliberate and automatic strategies, and applies to increasing an emotion as well as decreasing it (Gross, 1998; Gross, 2015).

What is the process model of emotion regulation?
It is James Gross's framework that locates regulation at five points in the emotion-generative sequence: situation selection, situation modification, attentional deployment, cognitive change, and response modulation. The first four are antecedent-focused and the last is response-focused (Gross, 1998).

What is the difference between reappraisal and suppression?
Reappraisal changes how a situation is construed before the emotion is fully formed, lowering experience, expression, and physiological arousal together. Suppression inhibits the outward signs of an emotion already under way, cutting expression but leaving experience largely intact and increasing arousal (Gross & Levenson, 1993; Gross & John, 2003).

Which emotion regulation strategy is best?
No single strategy is best in all situations. Reappraisal is effective on average, but effective regulation is defined by regulatory flexibility — matching the strategy to the demands of the context and switching when it is not working (Bonanno & Burton, 2013; Sheppes et al., 2015).

How is emotion regulation measured?
Chiefly by self-report. The Emotion Regulation Questionnaire scores habitual reappraisal and suppression, and the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale indexes regulation failures across several facets (Gross & John, 2003; Gratz & Roemer, 2004).

What happens in the brain during emotion regulation?
Reappraisal engages prefrontal and parietal regions associated with cognitive control, which modulate activity in emotion-generating structures such as the amygdala. Different strategies recruit partly distinct neural systems rather than one control network (Ochsner & Gross, 2005; Buhle et al., 2014; Etkin et al., 2015).

How does emotion regulation relate to mental disorders?
Emotion dysregulation is a transdiagnostic feature of psychopathology. Strategies such as rumination, avoidance, and suppression are broadly linked to disorder, while reappraisal and problem solving are weakly protective (Aldao et al., 2010; Sheppes et al., 2015).

Can emotion regulation be improved?
Yes. Because regulation is a family of learnable processes rather than a single fixed trait, interventions can teach strategies such as reappraisal and, increasingly, the flexibility to select among strategies; beliefs about emotion are themselves a target for change (Ford & Gross, 2019; McRae & Gross, 2020).

References