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Emotion Regulation Flexibility

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Abstract

How do people flexibly regulate their emotions in order to manage the diverse demands of varying situations? This question assumes particular importance given the central role that emotion regulation (ER) deficits play in many forms of psychopathology. In this review, we propose a translational framework for the study of ER flexibility that is relevant to normative and clinical populations. We also offer a set of computational tools that are useful for work on ER flexibility. We specify how such tools can be used in a variety of settings, such as basic research, experimental psychopathology, and clinical practice. Our goal is to encourage the theoretical and methodological precision that is needed in order to facilitate progress in this important area.

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Notes

  1. Intrinsic goals need not be always hedonic (i.e., reduce negative and/or increase positive affect). In fact, a growing literature suggests that in many instances people engage in counter-hedonic, or instrumental, emotion regulation (i.e., increase negative and/or reduce positive affect; see work by Tamir et al. 2008; Tamir et al. in press).

  2. Our examples focus on the ER strategies of reappraisal and expressive suppression because there is a vast experimental literature documenting the mechanisms underlying their selection, implementation, and consequences (e.g. Gross 2013; Sheppes et al. 2014; Webb et al. 2012). However, our framework can be utilized with a wide range of strategies, such as acceptance (e.g., Hayes et al. 1999), rumination (e.g., Nolen-Hoeksema et al. 2008), worry (e.g., Borkovec et al. 2004), self-injury (e.g., Nock 2010), and emotional eating (e.g., Aldao and Dixon-Gordon 2014), among others.

  3. This challenge, of course, it not specific to the study of ER flexibility, but rather it pertains to the broader field of affective science, since regardless of the methodological complexity of a given study, investigators still rely on participants’ verbal reports of their emotional experiences.

  4. Although both types of variability are related (i.e., if one uses strategy A with great variability across situations, that means that within each one of those situations, there might be greater variability in the strategies that are used), it is also possible that there might be individual differences in the tendency to display one type of variability versus the other one. Within-strategy variability might reflect the ability to initiate and stop a given process (i.e., inhibition) whereas between-strategy variability might reflect the process of searching for the best possibility. Thus, it will be important for future work elucidate the extent to which each type of variability is susceptible to individual differences.

  5. We could also compare the same strategy (or combination of strategies) to different goals (that we could experimentally manipulate). For example, this would allow us to answer whether a man’s suppression flexibility is more adaptive for hiding facial expressions than for remembering information. In this case, we would (1) assign a 0 to the second term in each parenthetical term, and (2) subtract one parenthetical term from the other one.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Kara Christensen, Lee Dunn, Andre Plate, Ilana Seager, and Anne Wilson for their comments on earlier versions of this manuscript.

Conflict of Interest

This work received no funding/support and the data have not been presented elsewhere. Given that this is a theoretical review, there was no involvement of human or animal subjects.

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All procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (national and institutional). Informed consent was obtained from all individual subjects participating in the study. If any identifying information is contained in the paper the following statement is also necessary—Additional informed consent was obtained from any subjects for whom identifying information appears in this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, The Ohio State University, 1835 Neil Ave, Columbus, OH, 43215, USA

    Amelia Aldao

  2. School of Psychological Sciences, Tel Aviv University, 69978, Tel Aviv, Israel

    Gal Sheppes

  3. Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 94305-2130, USA

    James J. Gross

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  1. Amelia Aldao
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  2. Gal Sheppes
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Correspondence to Amelia Aldao.

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Aldao, A., Sheppes, G. & Gross, J.J. Emotion Regulation Flexibility. Cogn Ther Res 39, 263–278 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10608-014-9662-4

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