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Humans are born with emotions. Whether joy, anger, sorrow or delight, our emotions can sway our decisions, enrich our lives and shape our relationships. They are also a double-edged sword: they can make us better, or they can do us harm. When our emotions get the better of us, we can pay a price for it — making an impulsive mistake at work that damages our career, say, or wrecking a relationship in a moment of lost control. Conversely, when we manage our emotions well, the benefits reach across our mental health, our relationships, the way we handle hardship, and our studies and work. Little wonder, then, that so many people want to learn to manage their emotions well — and that many psychologists have actively researched and proposed different emotion regulation strategies, drawing them together and comparing them. Today, let's look at five of those strategies together.
| Strategy one：Situation selection |
| Strategy two：Situation modification |
| Strategy three：Attentional deployment |
| Strategy four：Cognitive change |
| Strategy five：Response modulation |
Strategy one：Situation selection
It's easy to think of situations tied to particular emotions. At a bar, we feel relaxed; facing our coursework, we feel stress. Situation selection is about choosing to avoid or approach certain situations. By choosing to steer clear of or shake off certain situations, we can reduce the chances of the corresponding emotion arising; conversely, if we want to bring on a particular emotion, we can actively put ourselves into the situations linked to it.
We often use these techniques in everyday life. If we want to relieve stress, we can choose to put work aside for a while and leave the environment that's making us feel pressured. Or, when we want to feel good, we might arrange to catch up with friends over a drink. Still, using this strategy well isn't easy, because it's hard to predict our future emotional responses accurately — when we get together with a friend we haven't seen in years, how we'll end up feeling is anyone's guess. So we often can't judge accurately and appropriately which situations we should avoid or approach.
Strategy two：Situation modification
Sometimes the situations around us are hard to choose, yet we can still adjust them through our own actions. Situation modification means changing the external situation around us (rather than our inner world) in order to alter the emotional impact that the environment brings. For example, if we suddenly run into a former partner, we can decide whether or not to speak to him (or her) by anticipating our own emotions and the responses that might arise — or we can adjust the content of the conversation, our physical distance and so on, so as to avoid an emotion we don't want or to reach one we do, such as avoiding awkwardness, or staying as natural as possible.
Strategy three：Attentional deployment
Even so, the surrounding environment and other people's responses may still not turn out as we expect. Our surroundings and our lives are in fact full of all sorts of other things, and some of them have a better chance of prompting a more fitting emotional response. This process of focusing or shifting our attention is attentional deployment.
One of its main methods is distraction. For instance, if a job application falls through, we can choose to focus on the next interview opportunity or on our other interests, so that we can reduce the appearance of the related emotion and the impact it brings. As for when it applies, research suggests that when dealing with high-intensity emotions it is more effective than other methods, because it is easy to apply.
On top of that, rumination and worrying also count as ways of diverting attention away from an emotion towards thinking, as a way of not being directly affected by the emotion. These methods, however, can fix our thoughts on the negative emotion, and in the end may backfire, causing an even greater emotional impact.
Strategy four：Cognitive change
Effective as the three methods above are, they don't truly change our circumstances or the causal relationship between them and our emotions. That said, whether something is good or bad is often only a matter of perspective and cognition — so we can change our appraisal of a situation, and thereby change its emotional meaning.
One of the main methods within cognitive change is cognitive reappraisal. It means reinterpreting the meaning of an event in order to change the event's emotional impact. If we fail an exam while a good friend comes top, we may react with envy or resentment — but if we change how we understand it and interpret it as our friend's achievement, then decide to learn from their example, we can turn the negative emotion into something positive, even into motivation. Psychological research also points out that this method has a positive effect on both our health and our relationships; however, because it is more demanding, it tends to be better suited to dealing with lower-intensity emotions, and in some situations it may even backfire.
Strategy five：Response modulation
This method differs markedly from the four above: the first four, because they are used before an emotional response appears, are collectively termed "antecedent-focused"; the fifth, because it is used after an emotional response has occurred, is classed as "response-focused".
Response modulation involves a good many different types of behaviour, such as exercise, sleep, even alcohol, drugs and so on, all of which have some effect on emotion regulation; we must, however, also take into account the long-term effects these methods have on our physical and mental health, so as to guard against problems such as alcohol dependence and substance misuse.
Another method is expressive suppression. Holding emotions in rather than expressing them does have some use in controlling our facial expression, heart rate and the like; but compared with cognitive reappraisal, it has a weaker effect on curbing negative emotions; and because it is more deliberate, it consumes more energy; it may also harm our ability to express positive emotions, weaken our social skills, and is unhealthy for our physical and mental development (for example, it is positively associated with depressive symptoms) — so it compares unfavourably. If you really must use this method, it should be used with care.
How can we use emotion regulation strategies flexibly?
As the name suggests, we need to decide which emotion regulation strategy to use according to the needs of each situation at hand. Everyone differs in personality, circumstances, the society and culture they live in, and so on, so the same method will have different effects for different people. Compared with people in more individualist cultures, people in collectivist cultures experience less of a negative impact from using expressive suppression. We also have different emotion regulation goals in different settings — when giving a public speech, for example, we are more likely to need to control negative emotions such as stage fright, while in the longer term our goals should also look after our mental health. In recent years, more and more research has pointed out that psychological problems may be linked to an inability to use emotion regulation strategies flexibly, that each method has its own strengths and weaknesses, and that future research should lean more towards understanding which method people should use in different situations. So we should avoid blindly applying any single method, and should instead adapt flexibly as the need requires — and, better still, pair this with a deeper understanding of our own personality and traits, and learn to judge the appropriate way to respond in different situations, in order to decide how to manage our emotions.
When you need emotional support right now
Learning emotion regulation skills is a long-term project, but emotional low points often arrive suddenly — late at night, at the weekend, in the moment when work pressure boils over. At times like these, a counsellor may not be available straight away.
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References
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Bonanno, G. A., and Burton, C. L. (2014). Regulatory flexibility: an individual differences perspective on coping and emotion regulation. Psychol. Sci. 8, 591–612. doi: 10.1177/1745691613504116
Gross, J. J., and Levenson, R. W. (1993). Emotional suppression: physiology, self-report, and expressive behavior. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 64, 970–986. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.64.6.970
Gross, J. J., and John, O. P. (2003). Individual differences in two emotion regulation processes: Implications for affect, relationships, and well-being. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 85, 348–362. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.85.2.348
Gross, J. J. (2002). Emotion regulation: affective, cognitive and social consequences. Psychophisiology 39, 281–291. doi: 10.1017/S0048577201393198
Gross, J. J. (1998). “The emerging field of emotion regulation: An integrative review”. Review of General Psychology. 2 (3): 271–299. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.476.7042. doi:10.1037/1089-2680.2.3.271.
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