social; week 4; emotion regulation

What are emotions and how are they generate?

emotions are a short-lived complex reaction pattern, involving experiential, behavioural, and physiological elements, by which an individual attempts to deal with a personally significant matter or event

Emotion generation: the modal model of emotion

situation → attention → appraisal → response

• Situation can be real or imagined

• Attention is direct towards the emotional situation

• Appraised (evaluated/interpreted) either consciously or unconsciously in terms of what it means in relation to an individual’s goals

• Generates an emotional response which leads to changes in experiential, behavioural and physiological response systems

Emotions in daily life

Trampe et al., (2015):

• Conducted an experience sampling study (N = 11,000+)

• Aimed to capture emotions in everyday life

• Found that participants experienced at least one emotion 90% of the time

• Positive emotions experience 2.5 times more frequently than negative emotions

• Also frequently experience mixed emotions

• Most frequently experienced emotions: (1) joy, (2) love, (3) anxiety

Functions of emotions

• prepare the body for action

• influence our thought process

• motivate future behaviours

• influence interpersonal relationships

However we don’t always let our emotions flow freely

What is emotion regulation?

• Emotion regulation refers to the processes aimed at influencing which emotions someone has, when they have them and how they experience and express them (Gross, 1998)

• Involves monitoring, evaluating and modifying different aspects of emotions, such as the initiation, duration, magnitude, and frequency (McRae, 2013; Thompson, 1994)

Features of emotion regulation

• People may also want to maintain their current emotional state

• It is a motivated process (Tamir, 2020)

• Can be effortful and occur explicitly or it can be automatic and occur implicitly (Gyurak et al., 2011)

Taxonomy of motives- hedonic motives

Hedonic motives- motivations to feel pleasure

• people may want to feel pleasant emotions and avoid unpleasant ones

• Helps to understand:

  • down-regulation of negative emotions

  • up-regulation of positive emotions

Evidence for hedonic motives

• People more frequently report attempting to increase pleasant emotions and decreasing negative emotions

• When asked to list what they want to feel and why, participants listed prohedonic motives (i.e., increase positive or decrease negative) on 50% of the cases

instrumental motives

• motivations to perform certain behaviours to achieve certain goals

• people may also want to experience emotions that are helpful and avoid unhelpful ones

• Helps us to understand:

  • Up-regulation of negative emotions

  • Down-regulation of positive emotions

Evidence for instrumental motives

Tamir et al (2008)- performance motives

What did they do?

• Participants (N =82) read 2 different game scenarios: confrontational and non-confrontational

• Rated preferences for different types of activities before playing
  the games: anger-inducing vs. neutral vs. exciting

What did they find?

• Participants preferred anger-inducing activities when anticipating
  playing a confrontational, but not a non-confrontational game

What does this mean?

• People do not always want to feel good, sometimes they want to
  feel bad if it will help them to achieve their goals

Lane et al (2011)- performance motives - real life example

What did they do?

• Examined runners (N = 360) beliefs about the emotions
  associated with ideal performance and the regulatory strategies they used

What did they find?

• Greater use of strategies to increase unpleasant emotions was associated with the belief that increasing anger or anxiety helps performance

What does this mean?

• Tamir’s findings regarding instrumental reasons for regulating can be applied outside of the lab to help achieve goals

Instrumental motives in daily life- Kalokerinos et al., (2017)

Kalokerinos et al., (2017)

• Daily diary study that lasted for 7 days

• Reported the most negative event of the day and their instrumental motives in that event

• Performance motives were endorsed in approximately 1 in 3 events

• Other instrumental motives endorsed in approximately 1 in 10 events

• Motives varied depending on the context

Daily diary studies are similar to experience sampling methodologies (ESM) in that data is collected in a naturalistic setting – however, unlike ESM, data will only be collected at one time point (usually towards the end of the day).

How do people regulate emotions? Parkinson & Totterdell (1999)

Emotion regulation strategies

• Identified 162 distinct strategies*

• Organised them based on:

  • Whether they were implemented behaviourally (e.g., doing something) or cognitively (e.g., think about something)

  • Whether they involved engaging with (e.g., reappraisal) or disengaging from (e.g., distraction) the emotional situation

  • However, many strategies involve a mixture of both cognition and emotion (e.g., guided mindfulness)

• Some strategies can be implemented cognitively or behaviourally

Common Strategies:

Reappraisal: “Modifying how we appraise the situation we are in to alter its emotional significance, either by changing how we think about the situation or our capacity to manage the demands it poses”

Distraction: “Focuses attention on different aspects of the situation or moves attention away from the situation altogether”

Suppression: “When one tries to inhibit ongoing negative or positive emotion-expressive behaviour”

Process Model of Emotion Regulation

• Can use different strategies to regulate emotions depending on the point in the emotion generation process (Gross, 1998)

• Strategies before the emotion response = antecedent-focused strategies

• Strategies after the emotion response = response-focused strategies

• 

Situation selection

• Choose to enter or avoid situations depending on how they will make you feel

• Used before the emotion generation process begins

• For example, you know attending a particular event will make you feel anxious, so you choose not to go

Situation Modification

• Change aspects of the situation you are in

• Used during the “situation” stage of emotion generation

• For example, you have attended an event and begin to feel anxious, so you limit the amount of time that you spend there

Attentional Deployment

• Change what you are focusing on in a particular situation

• Used during the “attention” stage of emotion generation

• One strategy is “distraction” – for example, you may scroll through social media to take your mind of what is happening in a situation

Cognitive Change

• Think about the situation differently

• Used during the “appraisal” stage of emotion generation

• One strategy is “reappraisal” – for example, you may try to find a “silver lining” in the situation that you are in

Response modulation

• Response-focused strategies alter the emotion when it is in full swing

• These are used during the “response” stage of emotion generation

• For example, you may try to take some deep breaths or try to suppress/hide your true emotional response

Multi-stage process

• Identification- Involves identifying a discrepancy between how you do feel and how you want to feel

• selection- Decide whether you want and/or able to regulate your emotions? If so, how will you choose to do this?

• implementation- The selected strategy is put into action in an attempt to regulate emotions

• monitoring- Involves monitoring the progress and success of the regulation attempt, if successful it can be stopped, if unsuccessful it can be switched

Which strategies are effective?

Webb et al., 2012

• Systematic review of 306 studies that asked participants to use a strategy to regulate emotions and then examined the effectiveness

• e.g., Donaldson & Lam (2004): compared effects of playing scrabble (distraction) vs., thinking about what feelings mean (rumination) on mood

• Studied effects on three different types of outcome:

  • Experiential, behavioural, physiological

• They found:

  • distraction helped people to feel better, but did not influence behavioural or physiological measures

  • Concentration exacerbated the emotion (i.e., made them feel worse)

  • Reappraisal had a small-to-medium sized effects on emotional responses

  • Suppression influenced behavioural measures but it did not influence how people actually felt and had a negative impact on physiological measures

• What does this all mean?

  • Different emotion regulatory processes are differentially effective

  • Findings suggest that reappraisal is an effective strategy

The role of context

• The effects of different strategies are context specific

• Global conclusions regarding one strategy being “better” than another are possibly misleading (Gross, 2014)

• Shift in research to consider ER to be an interaction between person, situation, and strategy (Dore et al., 2016)

• Suggests that for effective and successful regulation we need to take the context into account and to be able to flexibly switch between different strategies depending on the context (Troy et al., 2016)

Rotweiller et al (2018)

What did they do?

Experience sampling study (N = 68) where participants reported mood, their most intensely experienced emotion and whether it was regarding an exam-related or non-exam-related context

What did they find?

Suppression improved mood in exam-related anxiety and distraction improved mood in only non-exam-related anxiety

What does this mean?

Important to not classify strategies as effective vs. ineffective but also consider the context

Emotion regulation choice

selection of whether and how to regulate (MSP)

• Whether and how people choose to regulate their emotions from the strategies available to them in a situation where regulation is warranted
   (e.g., Sheppes et al., 2011, 2014)

intensity of the emotion- Sheppes et al., (2011)

What did they do?

• Participants choose between reappraisal and distraction to regulate emotions in response to images of low vs. high intensity

What did they find?

• Low intensity, prefer to reappraise

• High intensity, prefer to distract

What does this mean?

• Aspects relating to the emotion being regulated influence choice of regulation strategy

Proposed explanation- sheppes et al., (2011)

Balancing processing the emotion and regulation the emotion

• Reappraisal is more effortful than distraction as you have to engage with the emotional stimuli

Why is ERC research important?

• Flexibly choosing between different strategies is associated with psychological health and wellbeing

• Rigid choice might be associated with various forms of psychopathology

• By understanding what strategies healthy adults make in different situations, deviations can be identified to understand different forms of psychopathology

Broad factors that influence ERC

Why is emotion regulation important?

Successful emotion regulation is associated with:

• Successful functioning in day-to-day life (Christou-Champi et al., 2015)

• Psychological wellbeing and health (Aldao et al., 2010; Martins et al., 2010)

• Creating and maintaining social relationships (Gross & John, 2003)

• Work performance (Diefendorff et al., 2000)

Emotion regulation and mental health- Aldao et al., (2010)

What did they do?

• Meta-analysis to examine relationships between 6 strategies (acceptance, avoidance, problem solving, reappraisal, rumination and suppression) and symptoms of 4 psychopathologies (anxiety, depression, eating, substance-related disorders)

What did they find?

• Maladaptive strategies (rumination, avoidance, suppression) were associated with more psychopathology

• Adaptive strategies (acceptance, reappraisal and problem solving) were associated with less psychopathology

• Rumination showed the largest effect size

What does this mean?

• How people regulate their emotions may have an influence on their mental health

What about the social side of emotion regulation?

Interpersonal emotion regulation (IER)

• Humans are social beings, and both the experience and regulation of emotions often occur within social contexts

• Interpersonal emotion regulation involves the pursuit of an emotion regulation goal in a social interaction

  • Intrinsic Interpersonal Emotion Regulation- Individual initiates social contact to regulate their own emotions

  • Extrinsic Interpersonal Emotion Regulation- A person attempts to regulate another person’s emotions

Interpersonal emotion regulation (IER)

• Zaki & Williams (2013) also distinguish between response-dependent and response-independent IER

• Response-dependent regulation depends on the feedback of another person

• Response-independent regulation does not require feedback of the other person

IER in daily life- Tran et al (2023)

• Daily diary and experience sampling methods to explore interpersonal emotion regulation (both intrinsic and extrinsic) in everyday social interactions

• Regulate others’ emotions nearly twice a day (extrinsic)

• Regulate their own emotions through others around once a day (intrinsic)

• Regulate own and others’ emotions in the same interaction approximately every other day

• Typically, people were trying to improve how the other person was feeling

intrinsic IER - strategies

Strategies:

• Social sharing: When feelings about events are shared with others

• Co-reappraisal: When someone else is sought out to offer a different perspective on an emotional event

• People share negative emotional experiences roughly every other day (Liu et al., 2021)

• People distribute their emotion regulation needs across different relationships and have a range of “emotionships” (Cheung et al., 2015)

Extrinsic IER: characteristics and strategies

four key characteristics:

• 1.Goal-directed

  2.Deliberate process

  3.Targets an affective (i.e., feeling) state

  4.Belongs to someone else than the person doing the regulating (i.e., has a social target)

Extrinsic IER: stratgeies- Niven et al., (2009)

Questionnaires, diary studies and a card sorting task

Key distinctions:

• Improve vs. worsen affect

• Engagement vs. relationship- oriented strategies

extrinsic IER in daily life- Double et al., (2024)

What did they do?

• Used experience sampling to look at the extrinsic IER strategies people use and how they relate to personal characteristics (N = 165)

• Assessed use of 5 strategies: humour, distraction, cognitive reframing, receptive listening and valuing

• Measured empathy, emotional intelligence, self-esteem, and personality (Big-5: conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, openness)

What did they find?

• People do frequently report regulating other people’s emotions

• Regulate emotions of people we are close to (e.g., partner, friends)

• Receptive listening and valuing were used most frequently (humour and distraction used least frequently)

• Personality traits, empathy, and gender influenced strategy use

Extrinsic IER: Motives

• People do regulate others emotions for hedonic reasons (e.g., Gable & Reis, 2010; Rime, 2007)

• People will also make other people feel worse to achieve certain goals (e.g., Lopez-Perez et al., 2017; Netzer et al., 2015; Niven et al., 2016)

• 

Instrumental and prosocial motives- Niven et al., (2016)

what did they do?

• Created situations in which it would be useful for participants to be either happy (collaborative game) or angry (aggressive game)

• Participants were asked to select stimuli for a friend facing these situations (i.e., what to view before playing a collaborative or angry game)

• Half of the participants were in a situation where they would benefit themselves (instrumental) and half where the other participant would benefit (prosocial)

What did they find?

• When enhancing friends' performance would benefit their friend (prosocial) or themselves (instrumental), participants selected performance-conducive emotion-inducive stimuli

• Either happy (collaborative game) or angry (aggressive game) stimuli

What does this mean?

• People will induce emotions that they think will be useful to achieve a goal, even if this means making someone feel more negative

Interpersonal motives in daily life- Tran et al., (2025)

• Two week daily-diary study to examine why people regulate others’ emotions in social interactions

• Most commonly used to make others feel better (55% of ER instances)

• But people did often have self-focused motives too

  • Wanting to feel helpful or good about the self (16%)

  • To avoid feeling uncomfortable (12%)

• People also regulate others to help them achieve a goal (19%) or to achieve their own goals (17%)

IER outcomes

• Development of closer friendships (e.g., Rose et al., 2007)

• Increased feelings of intimacy between romantic partners (e.g., Horn et al., 2019)

• Increased feelings of social connections and more supportive relationships (e.g., Williams et al., 2018)

• More diverse “emotionships” associated with higher wellbeing (e.g., Cheung et al., 2015)

There are benefits for both the regulator and target for extrinsic IER

Effectiveness of intrapersonal vs interpersonal emotion regulation- Levy-Gigi & Shamay-Tsoory (2017)- What did they do?

• Randomly assigned each person in a couple (N = 47) as the target or the regulator

• The target viewed pictures and was instructed to either:

  • Choose and apply a strategy to regulate their own emotions (intrapersonal)

  • Apply a strategy chosen by their partner (extrinsic interpersonal)

What did they find?

• Extrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation was
  more effective at reducing distress than
  intrapersonal

What does this mean?

• Highlights the advantage of an outside
  perspective in reducing stress and improving
  emotion regulation

Summary

• Emotion regulation refers to how people shape their own and other people’s emotions

• People regulate emotions for a range of reasons: prohedonic motives and instrumental motives

• There are a range of strategies available to people to regulate emotions, but the effectiveness of the strategies depends on the context

• People can choose how to regulate emotions and there are a range of factors that influence this choice: affective, cognitive, motivational, individual and socio-cultural

• Emotion regulation isn’t confined to intrapersonal processes, people often engage in emotion regulation in social contexts either to regulate their own emotions (intrinsic IER) or to help others to regulate their emotions (extrinsic IER)

• There are a number of personal and social outcomes associated with successful regulation

emotion regulation - reading

• refers to attempts to influence emotions in ourselves or others

• in the 1990s, the field of emotion regulation (ER) emerged as a distinct research domain

• ER focuses on people’s attempts to influence emotions, defined as time-limited, situationally bound, and valenced (positive or negative) states

• ER is broad in that it is not limited to the down-regulation of negative emotions (fear, anxiety, stress) but encompasses up- and down regulation of positive and negative emotions in accordance with regulation-related goals.

• Where goal pursuit is often conscious and deliberate, ER can also occur implicitly, outside conscious awareness

The process model of ER- reading, emotion generation

• framework that has helped to organize work on ER

• a- emotion generation is encountering relevant situations, attending to key aspects of the situations, appraising the situations in relation to goals, and having experiential, physiological, and/or behavioural responses.

• a-For example, an individual might have a job interview (situation), notice the cool demeanor of the evaluator (attention), interpret the coolness as displeasure with the interviewee (appraisal), and experience fear and begin fidgeting (response) in the interview.

• The output of the emotion generation cycle creates a new aspect of the situation (sitting in a job interview while feeling afraid and fidgeting), and the cycle repeats.

• According to the process model, the ER cycle begins with a discrepancy between someone’s goal state (i.e., the emotional state they desire) and the actual (or projected) state.

• c-This discrepancy is then identified as an opportunity for regulation (1), a regulation strategy is selected from alternatives (2), the strategy is implemented through specific tactics (3), and the whole cycle is monitored for success in achieving the regulatory goal.

• c-In the job interview scenario, identification would involve noticing the feeling of fear but wanting to feel excited and believing this emotion can change. Selection would occur when deciding to modify expressive behaviour rather than attention to the interviewer. Implementation would involve increasing tension on facial muscles to prevent displaying a worried countenance. Monitoring could include noting changes in the environment, which would indicate the need to continue, stop, or switch to a different ER strategy—processes that contribute to ER flexibility

• 

reappraisal - reading

• Much of the research to date has focused on a strategy called cognitive reappraisal

• involves changing how one thinks about a situation to influence one’s emotional response.

• Reappraisal is thought to be generally effective and adaptive, but there are important qualifications.

extrinsic regulation- reading

• he regulation of someone else’s emotions

what consequences does emotion regulation have? Refer to what has been seen in studies, implementation, selection and reappraisal

• Reappraisal’s success contrasts with suppression, which results in weak, null, or paradoxical (reversed) changes in negative emotion.

• Consequences of reappraisal also contrast distraction, in that reappraisal results in less short-term success in decreasing negative emotion than distraction, but is more effective upon later encounters with the stimulus.

• Greater reappraisal frequency is associated with greater physical health, higher academic achievement & more positive social outcomes.

• This contrasts greater suppression frequency, which is associated with lesser well being, more symptoms of psychopathology, and lesser relationship satisfaction.

• However, suppression seems to be a relatively adaptive skill early in development, and is associated with greater school readiness in preschoolers

What determines (moderates) emotion regulation? Specifically reappraisal

• Laboratory studies indicate that reappraisal is more successful when

  • the negative emotion is moderately intense,

  • is generated from cognitive rather than perceptual emotional stimuli,

  • when there is more time available to regulate.

• The presence of positive emotion, perhaps only in negative emotion-eliciting situations, may facilitate reappraisal success.

• The engagement of prefrontal cortex (PFC) control regions during reappraisal suggests that reappraisal may be less successful when PFC-dependent cognition is impaired, like sleep deprivation and stress.

• Developmental variation in PFC functioning are associated with less successful reappraisal.

What factors determine how often people use reappraisal?

• Reappraisal frequency is less heritable and more open to environmental influences than emotion-relevant personality dimensions or suppression frequency.

• Individual factors that determine ER frequency include social relationship partners, esp in childhood, and personality factors.

• Individuals select reappraisal more frequently when the stimuli is less intense or contain more reappraisal affordances and use reappraisal less frequently when they have anticipatory information about the content of emotion-relevant events.

• Individuals from cultures that value self-reflection tend to use reappraisal more frequently, whereas individuals from cultures that value open expression of emotion tend to use suppression less frequently.

• Furthermore, history of having short-term success might lead to more frequent use of maladaptive strategies such as self-injurious behaviour

What are the mechanisms (mediators) of emotion regulation?

• Neurobiological mechanisms of reappraisal implementation include brain systems that support cognitive control and linguistic elaboration.

• Psychological mechanisms governing the selection of reappraisal include decision-making processes, in which the need for regulation is balanced with:

  • anticipated success,

  • the estimated cognitive costs of implementing candidate strategies,

  • the desire to engage with the emotional aspects of the situation to be regulated.

Which interventions improve emotion regulation?

• Interventions for children often educate parents and/or teachers about healthy ER and offer children to practice ER through parent socialization at home or instruction about emotional intelligence at school.

• The goal is to decrease the frequency of maladaptive ER strategies and to increase the frequency and success of adaptive ER strategies.

• Cognitive therapies, like CBT, directly target reappraisal skills.

• CBT improves self-reported reappraisal success, and so does direct reappraisal training using a picture based task.

• Neurobiological interventions like antidepressant medication increase reappraisal frequency and success, and noninvasive stimulation of neural regions engaged during reappraisal increases reappraisal success and decreases symptoms of depression.

direction for future research- identification and monitoring

The consequence of not identifying a need to regulate is emotion regulation failure, and identification is determined by an individual’s emotion goals and their belief in the malleability of emotion. Mechanisms of identification include processes of goal pursuit, like goal setting, goal striving, or the use of implementation intentions.

Although monitoring is a stage of the process model, few studies examine consequences, determinants, mechanisms, and interventions related to monitoring of ER specifically. One exciting exception is the externalization of monitoring in fMRI–based neurofeedback.

We have distinguished between how well and how often people use reappraisal. Why is this important?

In many circumstances, they are conflated, especially as researchers summarize findings of previous studies of ER. This conflation is reasonable because the short-term success of reappraisal (e.g., successfully reduced negative emotion) could logically lead to long-term adaptive associates of reappraisal frequency. (e.g., lower levels of daily negative affect). However, how well and often reappraisal is used might be due to distinct constructs, as seen in clinical contexts.

One of the most reliable findings is that greater use of reappraisal is related to less symptoms of psychopathology, but studies of how well reappraisal is used by clinical groups have reported weak or null differences from non clinical groups. With few exceptions, it appears that members of clinical groups can successfully use reappraisal in a laboratory setting.

What is the source of this disconnect between reappraisal success and use?

One possibility is that individuals from clinical groups can use reappraisal successfully when cued, but fail to identify moments where ER would be helpful in everyday life.

Alternatively, members of clinical groups may in fact be able to identify moments at which ER would be helpful but for some reason choose not to use reappraisal very frequently.

It is also possible that laboratory use measures capacity, which is an over estimate of actual success everyday life.

Finally, it is possible that this disconnect is due to the way these constructs are measured (cumulative emotion ratings on a laboratory task vs. self-report responses). The source of the disconnect could have important implications for ER intervention science.

future directions and goals

In our view, when considering (or conducting) research on ER, it is helpful to clarify which stage of the ER process (identification, selection, implementation, or monitoring) is being described, manipulated, or measured because this will help to make subsequent ER interventions more targeted and precise.

A classic intuition: regulation is interpersonal

Research investigates how individuals deploy processes- such as reappraisal, distraction, expressive suppression, and distancing- in solitude. However, people commonly choose not to go it alone, and turn to others for help in their emotions.

Individuals draw on support to dampen stress and intensify positive affect, and even benefit from just the presence of others. Individuals often attempt to regulate others’ emotions, through empathic, supportive, and prosocial behaviours.

Early in life, interpersonal regulation may be the rule, not the exception.

Mapping the space of interpersonal regulation

Theorists have produced compelling models of interpersonal regulatory processes in which the term interpersonal regulation is used to capture phenomena, including:

• individuals’ desire to share their emotional states with others,

• the attenuation of negative affect in the presence of others

• the motivation to change others’ affective states.

Multiple uses of the same term slows progress in developing systematic models of interpersonal regulation. By integrate existing work into a simple framework we consider a broader domain of interpersonal regulation.

In mapping the space of interpersonal regulation, we make four conceptual “cuts”:

• (a) specifying when regulation is interpersonal and when it is not;

• (b) distinguishing interpersonal regulation from incidental affective consequences of social interaction;

• (c) dividing interpersonal regulation based on the use social interactions to regulate their own or others’ affect;

• (d) drawing a boundary between different processes that comprise interpersonal regulation.

Models of interpersonal regulation: Intra- Vs interpersonal regulation, interpersonal modulation of affect vs interpersonal regulation

Models of interpersonal regulation must specify when a regulatory episode is “interpersonal”. This is tricky, because intra- and interpersonal regulation exist on a continuum. We constrain our definition of interpersonal regulation to episodes

• (a) occurring in a live social interaction

• (b) represents the pursuit of a regulatory goal.

Although interpersonal regulation can only occur in social contexts, individuals can deploy intrapersonal regulatory processes (e.g., reappraisal) when they are alone or with others.

When do interpersonal episodes constitute “regulation”? Coan et al demonstrated that the mere presence of others attenuates negative affect in the face of stressors. This suggests that any social interaction could constitute regulation.

Nonetheless, a border can be drawn between interpersonal modulation of affect and interpersonal regulation. Because regulation typically refers to the pursuit of a goal to alter one’s affective state, whereas modulation of affect by social presence can occur outside of any goal. Social modulation plays a widespread and critical role in individuals’ affective lives, and can be integrated into a theory of interpersonal regulation.

Intra- Vs interpersonal regulation- Schachter (1959)

Schachter (1959) demonstrated that the desire for social contact in anticipation of negative events is likely evolutionarily old; monkeys and rats seek out social contact under stressful conditions.

Thus, modulation of affect by the mere presence of others is intimately tied to interpersonal regulation, and often represents the result of an earlier regulatory goal to seek out contact in anticipation of stressors.

This can be thought of as an interpersonal analogue of Gross’ (1998) “situation selection,” in which individuals seek out contexts that will reduce the need for later regulation

Intrinsic Vs extrinsic interpersonal regulation

We further divide interpersonal regulation according to whether the “target” of a regulation attempt is intrinsic or extrinsic. By intrinsic interpersonal regula tion, we refer to episodes in which an individual initiates social contact in order to regulate his own experience; by extrinsic interpersonal regulation, we refer to episodes in which a person attempts to regulate another person’s emotion. In an example, Alan (Person A) attempts to regulate his own affective state by soliciting contact with Betsy, whereas Betsy (Person B) attempts to regulate Person A’s affect. As such, Person A engages in intrinsic regulation whereas Person B engages in extrinsic regulation

Response-dependent Vs response-independent processes

We distinguish between two classes of processes: response-dependent and response-independent.

• Response dependent processes rely on the particular qualities of another person’s feedback. For instance, Person A may feel better after expressing his emotions to Person B, but only if Person B responds supportively.

• Response-independent processes occur in the context of social interactions, but do not require another person respond in a particular way. For instance, Person A might produce behaviours—such as labelling his emotions—while interacting with Person B, and these behaviours could regulate his affect regardless of Person B’s response.

Response-dependent and response independent processes are parallel to extrinsic and intrinsic regulation, so Person A and Person B can engage intrinsic and extrinsic regulatory strategies through response-dependent and response-independent processes.

These two dimensions (intrinsic vs. extrinsic; response-dependent vs. response-independent) create a 2 2 matrix of interpersonal regulatory processes. Different regulatory processes are NOT mutually exclusive.

But boundaries between interpersonal regulatory types are useful in organizing data and concepts. For instance, these distinctions allow us to integrate previous models of interpersonal regulation under one simple framework. Person A shares his emotions as a way of recruiting social resources, whereas Person B regulates Person A’s state by providing support. These individuals are clearly deploying different regulatory strategies, and yet both have been referred to as “interpersonal emotion regulation”. Under the current model, we can differentiate Person A and Person B as using intrinsic and extrinsic interpersonal regulation, respectively.

Building a Process Model of Interpersonal Strategies

Independent lines of research suggest a number of very different answers to this question. We now use the space mapped above to organize this prior work and begin building a model of the many potential processes that make up intrinsic and extrinsic interpersonal regulation.

Intrinsic interpersonal regulation- social sharing

Person A’s affective experiences produce a motive to control emotion, and this prompts him to express his emotion to Person B.

Social sharing is a prevalent responses to emotional events, regardless of if the event is positive or traumatic, and measured retrospectively or induced experimentally.

Social sharing doesn’t always represent an attempt to regulate one’s emotion: some forms are automatic components of affective experiences that occur regardless of any motive. However, features of social sharing suggest it often reflects regulatory motives.

First, individuals modulate their expressive behaviour (including facial actions) in response to the presence of audiences.

Second, individuals are most likely to share affect with others whom they believe can help them.

These data suggest that social sharing—at least in some cases— reflects interpersonal regulatory goals.

Response-dependent processes

Intrinsic interpersonal regulation is risky because its success often depends on more than one person. Consider our example above. If, instead of comforting Person A, Person B had rattled off her high marks in organic chemistry and pointed out that people who perform poorly in that class often fail medical school entrance exams, Person A might feel considerably less well after this encounter. Response-dependency is a common feature of inter personal regulation. For instance, sharing good news with others can intensify positive affect, but only when others respond with enthusiasm, and social sharing can soften the impact of negative experiences, but only when others respond supportively.

How do response-dependent mechanisms facilitate regulation?

At least two possibilities come to mind.

First, others’ supportive behaviours can produce a safety signal that allows individuals to reconsider the events that elicited their emotion. This resource appraisal can transform a stressful event into a less threatening challenge, and alter responses to such events at subjective, physiological, and neural levels.

A second, more diffuse response-dependent mechanism suggests that such sharing (i.e., “being on the same page” as someone else) is experienced as rewarding itself. Further, sharing experiences serves as a proximate signal to affiliation: increasing the likelihood of longer-term connections and support between Persons A and B. Affiliation cues fulfill a need for interpersonal contact that could modulate affect and perception of support availability, even without changing their appraisal of a particular event.

Response-independent processes

Intrinsic interpersonal regulation can also work through processes that are independent of an audience’s particular response. Even if Person B fails to respond appropriately, Person A’s disclosure itself may contain psychological “ingredients” that promote regulatory success. For instance, to communicate emotions to others, targets must first label their affective states and the sources of those states; doing so often requires refining appraisals of the emotion one is feeling. This socially inspired conceptual sharpening, in turn, can serve a regulatory goal. For instance, labelling affective states—especially in a nuanced, or “fine grained” way— can reduce the ambiguity of affective states and facilitate coping, especially when labelling is accompanied by assessment of the causes underlying an affective state. To the extent that social sharing produces labelling and assessment, it should also facilitate regulation, regardless of Person B’s response.

Extrinsic interpersonal regulation

In the example above, Person A’s expressive behaviour serves as an “input” to Person B’s empathic affective experience (Figure 1b). Empathy comprises multiple distinct, but related phenomena, including understanding a social target’s state and sharing that state. These empathic components are neurally and behaviorally dissociable, but both depend on Person A’s ability to effectively express his affect. Further, both relate to a third empathic subcomponent: the motive to alter the trajectory of Person A’s emotional experience. This motive comprises an extrinsic regulatory goal; Person B can pursue this goal through a number of prosocial behaviours, such as providing Person A with situation-specific emotional support, comforting messages, diffuse support not associated with a single event, or practical support such as providing material resources. Although researchers rarely describe empathy and prosocial behaviour in regulatory terms, doing so offers an opportunity to synthesize several aspects of other-oriented affect and behaviour that are often considered independent or contradictory. Specifically, we can characterize prominent theories of these behaviours as examples of response-dependent and response-independent mechanisms supporting extrinsic regulatory goals.

Response-dependent processes

“Other-oriented” motivation: the goal to change another person’s state is just that. As such, this goal can only be fulfilled when succeeding in helping the other person. Under our framework, this motive is consistent with response-dependent regulatory processes.

For instance, Person B attempts to regulate Person A’s emotion. Person B can only fulfill her regulatory goal by receiving feedback from Person A that he has been helped. This is not guaranteed, as prosocial support often fails to modulate a target’s affect.

Beyond offering evidence that Person B has succeeded in her regulatory goals (helping Person A), feedback from Person A can also improve Person B’s own affective state.

Response-dependent processes- how might this occur?

Person B could vicariously experience the affective consequences of her own prosocial behaviour. So just as Person B experiences negative affect via her vicarious sharing of Person A’s initial expressions, Person B could also experience a reduction in negative affect via signs of Person A’s successful regulation.

This response-dependent mechanism provides motivation for other-oriented behaviour. Individuals’ levels of affect sharing predict prosocial behaviour, suggesting that individuals who experience strong vicarious affect use prosocial behaviour in the service of regulation.

response-independent processes

Tomasello et al. (2005), goals can be divided into two classes: external goals (the state of the world an individual wishes to achieve) and internal goals (a mental representation of that goal being fulfilled). Internal goals can be accomplished in the absence of external signals, like when an individual mistakenly believes they have completed a task. Extrinsic regulatory goals can be fulfilled in the absence of cues from an interaction partner.

Individuals often believe their prosociality benefits others (and as such, fulfills an extrinsic regulatory goal) more than it actually does, suggesting that Person B’s extrinsic goal can be fulfilled based on her perception that she has effectively altered another person’s action, whether or not this perception is based on feedback from Person A. These response-independent processes can improve Person B’s affective experiences during extrinsic interpersonal regulatory episodes (i.e., when she attempts to regulate Person A).

Prosocial behaviour—although apparently other-oriented—is often driven by purely intrapersonal regulatory goals. For instance, if Person B simply experiences Person A’s distress as a negative stimulus, her subsequent behaviour could reflect attempts to make herself (Person B) feel better. Sometimes this requires helping another person, but sometimes it does not. In some cases Person B might regulate her emotion by removing herself from the presence of Person A, or psychologically distancing herself from Person A’s distress. In fact, a recent study demonstrated that individual differences in emotion regulation ability track decreased prosocial motivation, likely reflecting effortful reduction of empathy. Critically, this form of regulation does not meet our criteria for extrinsic or interpersonal regulation.

A framework for organising past work and posing new questions

A process model of intrinsic interpersonal regulation suggests that inconsistency could reflect differences between response-dependent and response-independent regulatory mechanisms. If an individual seeks the safety signals afforded by social support, he will require a particular response from the person with whom he shares. If he instead seeks affiliation and contact with others, a less constrained response from others can suffice in regulating his emotion. Finally, if he need only clarify his affective states and their sources through labeling to feel better, then sharing can have salutary “side effects” that are independent of others’ feedback.

Similarly, individuals encountering someone else’s emotions often respond prosocially, but the psychological sources of this have remained the topic of an old and vociferous debate. Specifically, whereas Batson typically refers to prosociality as emerging through a fundamen tally other-oriented affective state, Cialdini and others have claimed that, instead, prosociality reflects self-oriented affective goals, such as reducing one’s own negative affect in response to others’ distress. An interpersonal regulatory framework allows us to reframe this: an individual’s responses to another person’s distress could represent (a) an extrinsic interpersonal goal to help the distressed other or (b) an intrapersonal goal to feel better one’s self.

A second avenue for future research will be examining the relationship between intra- and interpersonal regulation. The contextual factors that determine when people deploy intrapersonal versus interpersonal regulatory strategies have yet to be systematically ex plored.

Finally, the interpersonal regulation framework can powerfully describe regulation in many other domains. For instance, the formation of attachment relationships during childhood represent a critical early instantiation of interpersonal regulation that can guide individuals’ use of interpersonal regulatory strategies throughout their lives.

Similarly, an interpersonal regulatory framework is germane to understanding both psychiatric disorders—which often include abnormalities in interpersonal regulatory mechanisms—and psychotherapy—which often reflects formalized strategies for extrinsic interpersonal regulation and for training patients to better use intrinsic interpersonal regulation. The relevance of interpersonal regulation across disciplinary boundaries highlights the need to continue developing a synthetic, “portable” framework that can describe interpersonal regulatory processes across multiple domains