What is Emotional Regulation?

By Jeannie Tso

The issue with writing an article about ‘Emotional Regulation’ is that readers are polarized. I like to start with educating from a neutral standpoint, but that hardly exists with this topic. What brings you here to this article is likely one of two common possibilities: One, you are either the person who is struggling with your emotions and have unwanted outward behaviors or two, you are reading this on behalf of someone who needs help and you have been on the receiving end of a loved one’s behavioral outbursts.

Few of us operate in a space that is neutral. Often, emotions drive our thoughts and actions (Clore & Huntsinger, 2007). Rarely do thoughts and actions drive our emotions. Contrary to this are people who behave logically and in accordance to their own set of values. Even so, even logical people sometimes experience emotions so strongly that it can drive their behaviors. Sometimes, the overall effect of emotions are heightened by hormones, which arise during puberty or at other life events. Non-emotion things, like hormones and bodily stress, play a part to rounding out the human experience (Lupien, McEwen & Gunnar, 2009).

Emotions aren’t a bad thing. They can be a good thing. Excessive happiness has its place in celebrating. Here’s another example: Feeling hope instead of despair can cause us to become curious and open-minded to seeing more solutions. Even excessive sadness has its place and can help us to transition. Sadness may help us to understand the value of something, particularly in the absence of that posession. This in turn, can help us to decide what is important and make us ready to start a new beginning.

Emotions are a temporary, and not permanent, state of being; they can be energizing or calming or draining or have other effects on how we perform within routines and novel situations. We are not are our emotions. Furthermore, emotions are not courses of action, nor are they thoughts or intentions. But emotions do largely affect the physical parts of us. When we regulate our emotions to fit the desired outcome for a circumstance, we shape the effect our emotions have on us and on others. In other words, emotional regulation assists us in balancing thought, intent, and emotion…into a constructive outcome for individual selves and for our relationships (Kim, Gentile, Anderson & Barlett, 2022).

Regulating our emotions is a learned skill, a skill that can improve with practice. There are different tools and exercises that can assist with managing emotions within our physical performance and cognitive performance with work, social settings, family settings, school settings, with relation to our individual selves and general communication. The act of reigning in an existing emotion is possible. And expansion of an emotion is possible. When an emotion is in us and we sense that it’s about to multiply inside of us, we can make a decision on whether to let it grow or to let it pass or to shrink it.

Here are examples of the use of emotional regulation producing desired outcomes: Emotional regulation can help us to hear and process what other people say to us while we’re stressed, because we prevented strong emotions from overtaking our ability to concentrate and listen. In other words, we’ve taken preemptive action to enable executive functioning skills within the brain. Subsequently, we can then consciously choose how to respond, instead of involuntarily reacting. Self-advocacy is often a benefit of emotional regulation in group settings that have tricky dynamics.

Here are examples on how the lack of emotional regulation can have undesired outcomes: Behavioral outbursts, such as kicking furniture, throwing objects, and biting are some examples of unwanted behaviors. Risky behavior and verbal recklessness are also outcomes. Another example could be a person’s mind freezing, where they are then unable to consciously and deliberately respond to others. Another example could be that a person is unable to sustain their attention on a task, perhaps because they’re too excited about a recent activity and can’t collect themselves to match the task at hand. More concretely, it could be that they were outdoors playing sports and need to come inside and read for an hour. Or it could be that they’re into reading social media posts for hours on end or doing “desk job” things all day and need to energize themselves to exercise but can’t find the “motivation” to do it.

References:

Clore GL, Huntsinger JR. How emotions inform judgment and regulate thought. Trends in Cognitive Sciences. Published online 2007. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2007.08.005

Kim, E.-L., Gentile, D. A., Anderson, C. A., & Barlett, C. P. (2022). Are mindful people less aggressive? The role of emotion regulation in the relations between mindfulness and aggression. Aggressive Behavior, 48, 546–562. https://doi.org/10.1002/ab.22036

Lupien, S., McEwen, B., Gunnar, M. et al.(2009) Effects of stress throughout the lifespan on the brain, behaviour and cognition. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 10, 434–445. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2639