3 Ways to Regulate Your

Emotions
Reappraisal, suppression, and acceptance

We do a lot with our emotions, other than just feel them. John Milton wrote of the
kingly merits of “reigning” over them. Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray wished to “use
them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them,” while Vincent van Gogh spoke
of “obeying” them like they were the captains of our lives.

Indeed, as if the sheer experience of emotions wasn't enough — the crushing weight
of sadness, the maddening of anger, the solace of serenity, and the grace
of gratitude — we tend to spend a lot of resources on the pre- and post-production
of our emotional storylines.

We pick our favorites (joy), and seek all chances of running into them. And we have
our foes, penciled in ominous red (fear), to be avoided at all costs. And when these
foes inevitably show up at our doors, we do everything to turn them away. We resist
them. We deny them. We fight them. We reason with them. We redirect and reshape
them. But they loiter and linger, watching us labor with their aftermaths until,
suddenly, they tip their hats to their ill-mannered hosts and leave.

Emotion regulation — the processes by which individuals influence their emotions

— has been the subject of a wealth of psychological research. These processes may
be automaticand without our awareness (closing our eyes while watching scary
movies), or they can require our conscious efforts (forcing a smile before a talk,
despite feeling nervous). While there are a myriad of methods we regularly employ
to manage our emotions, researchers have identified a few defining features of
emotion regulation. These include having a goal (for example, watching an
uplifting comedy to alleviate sadness), as well as influencing
the dynamics and trajectory of an emotion (for example, lessening the intensity of
worry by distraction).

Although it may sometimes feel like they strike us out of the blue, emotions unfold
over time. According to the process model of emotion regulation, we can interfere
with emotional processes at different points during the emotion generation timeline
using different strategies. For instance, before the emotional reaction is activated,
we can target the selection and modification of the situation (for example, avoiding
dreaded situations), our attention to the situation (for example, looking somewhere
else), and the way we frame its meaning (for example, downplaying negative
events). Once the emotion is on its way, we can alter our behavioral or
physiological response to it (for example, smiling when feeling fearful).

Not all strategies are equally adaptive at regulating our emotions. In a recent
interview, Iris Mauss, one of the leading researchers on emotion regulation,
explained two of the most widely studied strategies — reappraisal and suppression
— and their consequences on our well-being:

Reappraisal is cognitive in nature, which means that it involves how people think
about and reframe emotional situations. It’s considered to be a positive type of
emotion regulation, because it is flexible and because it transforms the whole
emotion, rather than just one piece of it. Reappraisal is associated with lower levels
of depression and greater levels of well-being.

Suppression, in contrast, is basically still experiencing the emotion, but inhibiting

its behavioral expressions. It is considered to be a more negative type of emotion
regulation. One reason is that the experience part of the emotion still persists.
Another reason is more transactional in nature. It creates an asymmetry between
how a person feels and what other people see, and that’s thought to be related to
negative social processes.
Research has shown that people who use reappraisal strategies are able to reframe
stressful situations by reinterpreting the meaning of negative emotional stimuli.
They deal with challenging situations by taking a proactive role in restoring their
moods and in adopting more positive attitudes. These efforts are often rewarded
with more positive and less negative emotions, as well as resilience, better social
ties, greater self-esteem, and general life satisfaction.

Suppression, on the other hand, only affects the behavioral response of emotions,
and does little to reduce their actual experience. It’s thought to be cognitively and
socially costly — it takes continuous effort to control and suppress emotions — and
can create feelings of inauthenticity. Studies have shown that people who used
suppression were less able to repair their negative moods, despite “masking” their
inner feelings. They experienced fewer positive emotions and more negative
emotions, and had less life satisfaction and less self-esteem.

So how can we train our skills of effectively regulating our emotions? According to
Mauss, emotion regulation is not as simple as learning a few tricks on reframing our
circumstances. Various factors, including culture, can render different strategies
adaptive or maladaptive. Emotion regulation also depends on the intuitive beliefs
and mindsets people hold about their emotions. Do you think you have control over
your emotions? If "yes," then you are more likely to use reappraisal strategies than if
your answer is "no." Thus, as Mauss posits, training emotion regulation in more
adaptive ways may involve “altering people’s mindsets and beliefs about their
emotions.”

There is another form of emotion regulation (“a third axis”) that Mauss and
her team have been exploring, which may help us see emotion regulation in the
light of thousand-year-old traditions — acceptance.

Emotional acceptance is a stance of perceiving that one is emotional, but deciding

not to do anything about it, i.e., not to alter the emotion. Somewhat paradoxically,
emotional acceptance is related to decreased negative emotions, as well as resilience.
Thus, the absence of emotion regulation can sometimes have the best emotion
regulatory function. For example, people who accept their negative emotions when
they are stressed out experience less negative emotions than people who don't
accept their emotions. It’s one of the core processes of mindfulness, which involves
a number of different psychological processes. One of them is aware of your
emotional and psychological states, and the other one is non-reactance or
acceptance, which could also be thought of as the absence of emotion regulation.
That might seem contradictory at first glance, but perhaps it’s the combination of
both that you really want: a stance of emotional acceptance — acknowledging your
emotions and not being threatened by them — and the knowledge that you can, if
you want to, cognitively transform them.

Wisdom is said to be the “harmony of reason and the passions.” In our search for
this harmony, we go about our days feeling our emotions as much as trying to
regulate them. What if we anchored our emotional experiences in the conviction
that we have at our disposal the means to alter them? What if, instead of cherishing
our favorite visitors and turning away the others, we could “welcome them all
and...treat each guest honorably,” as Rumi wrote centuries ago? Even the unwanted
ones, with the ominous red letters. After all, while all guests, good or bad, come and
go with each sundown, the duration and outcome of their visits may in part depend
on our wisdom: how much we accept our passions, and how well we know our
reason.

References

Gross, J. J. (Ed.). (2014). Handbook of Emotion Regulation. Guilford publications.

Gross, J. J. (1998). The emerging field of emotion regulation: An integrative review. Review of General Psychology, 2(3), 271.

Gross, J. J., & John, O. P. (2003). Individual differences in two emotion regulation processes: implications for affect, relationships,
and well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(2), 348.

Solomon, R.C. (1976). The Passions. New York: Anchor/Doubleday.

Ford, B. Q. & Mauss, I. B. (2015). Culture and emotion regulation. Current Opinion in Psychology, (3), 1-5.

Ford, B. Q., Lam, P., John, O. P., & Mauss, I. B. (2017). The psychological health benefits of accepting negative emotions and

thoughts: laboratory, diary, and longitudinal evidence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (in press).