What Is Emotion Regulation, Why Do We Need It?

Emotion-Regulation

Emotions are the most important structures that add meaning to our lives, provide us with clues about our needs and determine our quality of life.  Emotions can occur every day, in every relationship and interaction.  Happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, fear and disgust are the most basic emotions experienced universally.  So what should we do when emotion occurs?  Should we express them as they are or suppress them?  The answers to these questions may differ from culture to culture.  However, when it is thought that emotions enrich our lives and motivate us for our actions, it may be more functional for us to try to regulate emotions.  Emotion regulation refers to processes involving what emotions we have and when, how we experience those emotions, and how we show them to other people.  These processes can occur spontaneously or in a controlled manner.

Premise-Focused and Response-Oriented Emotion Regulation

When it comes to emotion regulation, the first thing that comes to mind is to reduce negative emotions.  However, emotion regulation involves increasing, decreasing, or maintaining both positive and negative emotions.  Emotions can be regulated both before and after they occur.

Antecedent-focused emotion regulation refers to the things we do before the emotion occurs.  An example of antecedent-focused emotion regulation is that a student sees the interview during the graduate application process as an opportunity to understand how much they like or dislike the program instead of measuring their own worth or success.

Response-focused emotion regulation, on the other hand, refers to what we do after emotion arises.  An example of reaction-oriented emotion regulation is when a person does not show his excited expression on his face while holding cards that will win him the game in a card game.  From this point of view, two basic processes can be mentioned in emotion regulation: reappraisal and suppression.  Reappraisal is the cognitive reconsideration of a potentially emotional situation by an individual in order to reduce its emotional impact.  Reappraisal occurs early in the emotion generation process.  Suppression, on the other hand, is the individual's inhibition of the ongoing expression of emotion and is therefore reaction-oriented.

Emotion regulation is often confused with coping.  The primary focus in coping is to reduce negative emotions.  However, emotion regulation refers to a much broader concept and includes the regulation of both positive and negative effects.  Understanding and accepting emotion when it occurs, having the ability to remove the stress that may be experienced on the way to goals, and accessing emotion regulation strategies appropriate to the environment define emotion regulation.  Their absence or deficiencies in these indicate some difficulties in emotional regulation.  Difficulties in emotion regulation, that is, the functional failure of emotion regulation may have a negative impact on our psychological well-being.

Emotion-Regulation 

Emotion regulation strategies

Emotions are unique structures that belong to us.  Every emotion, positive or negative, has a function.  When an emotion occurs, we can try to identify it, understand how we experience that emotion and where we feel it in our body.

Emotions can help us better understand our needs and offer important clues about our lives.  For this reason, it is instructive to experience some emotions, even if they are challenging, and to be alone with those emotions.  It should be remembered that no emotion lasts forever.  Remember a time when you felt happy.  Just as your happiness does not last forever, the feeling that you experience, that compels you, will not last forever. 

Emotions are not good or bad, they are neutral.  What makes emotions good or bad is the meanings we attach to them.  Therefore, instead of immediately classifying the emotion we experience, we can think about the meaning we attribute to it.  Generally, emotions such as sadness and anger are labeled as bad by people.  However, both sadness and anger are extremely healthy emotions that should be experienced.

Sometimes we can have intense emotional experiences.  At such moments, we can organize our emotions by sharing them with other people or by writing them in a notebook.  Sometimes, even hearing what we experience and feel in our own voice can be effective on its own.

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