Emotion regulation

What is emotion regulation?

Emotion regulation is how we influence an emotion’s occurrence, duration, intensity, or expression. It can mean increasing a feeling, maintaining it, or reducing it, and it can happen deliberately or automatically.

How it works

Gross’s process model (1998) describes five families of strategies: situation selection, situation modification, attentional deployment, cognitive change, and response modulation. These mean choosing or changing situations, directing attention, changing interpretations, and modifying responses.

Before a difficult conversation, you might choose a quieter setting, focus on the question you need to resolve, or reconsider an assumption about the other person’s intention. These change different parts of the emotional process. Selecting a situation can also mean approaching it, and changing a response involves more than hiding an expression.

Why it matters

The options extend well beyond “calm down” or “hold it in.” Which approach helps depends on what you are trying to do and the situation you are in. The process model helps distinguish those options; it does not rank one as best for every occasion.