How do people regulate their – and others – emotions? An action control perspective

Understanding how people control their emotions – and those with whom they interact – can help to understand issues like well-being, how people achieve their goals, the nature of interpersonal relationships and so on. We propose that insights on the determinants of behaviour and the difficulties that people experience regulating their behaviour, might be used to understand the challenges that people face trying to regulate their emotions. The perspective (published in the European Review of Social Psychology, 2012) suggests that emotion regulation involves three self-regulatory tasks: (i) Identifying the need to regulate, (ii) deciding whether and how to regulate, and (iii) enacting a regulation strategy. This perspective has informed other frameworks for understanding emotion regulation (e.g., Gross’ extended process model, 2015), as well as permitted novel lines of enquiry (e.g., on how people select situations in order to regulate their emotions, Cognition & Emotion, 2018) and on intervention (e.g., on whether forming implementation intentions can help people to control their emotions, British Journal of Social Psychology, 2012). There is, however, the opportunity to extend this perspective further, to consider new questions such as whether it can be used to understand how people regulate others emotions, the development of mental health problems and so on.