Emotion Regulation: Current Status and Future Prospects

AbstractOne of the fastest growing areas within psychology is the field of emotion regulation. However, enthusiasm for this topic continues to outstrip conceptual clarity, and there remains considerable uncertainty as to what is even meant by “emotion regulation.” The goal of this review is to examine the current status and future prospects of this rapidly growing field. In the first section, I define emotion and emotion regulation and distinguish both from related constructs. In the second section, I use the process model of emotion regulation to selectively review evidence that different regulation strategies have different consequences. In the third section, I introduce the extended process model of emotion regulation; this model considers emotion regulation to be one type of valuation, and distinguishes three emotion regulation stages (identification, selection, implementation). In the final section, I consider five key growth points for the field of emotion regulation. AcknowledgmentsThis review builds upon and extends the author's prior reviews of this area (see Gross, 1998b Gross, J. J. (1998b). The emerging field of emotion regulation: An integrative review. Review of General Psychology, 2, 271–299.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar], 2013 Gross, J. J. (2013). Emotion regulation: Taking stock and moving forward. Emotion, 13, 359–365.[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 2014a Gross, J. J. (2014a). Emotion regulation: Conceptual and empirical foundations. In J. J. Gross (Ed.), Handbook of emotion regulation (2nd ed., pp. 3–20). New York, NY: Guilford. [Google Scholar]; Gross & Thompson, 2007 Gross, J. J., & Thompson, R. A. (2007). Emotion regulation: Conceptual foundations. In J. J. Gross (Ed.), Handbook of emotion regulation (pp. 3–24). New York, NY: Guilford. [Google Scholar]; Ochsner & Gross, 2014 Ochsner, K. N., & Gross, J. J. (2014). The neural bases of emotion and emotion regulation: A valuation perspective. In J. J. Gross (Ed.), Handbook of emotion regulation (2nd ed., pp. 23–42). New York, NY: Guilford. [Google Scholar]). I thank Amit Etkin, Carl Frankel, Amit Goldenberg, Eran Magen, Kevin Ochsner, Gal Sheppes, and Gaurav Suri for their help in developing the extended process model of emotion regulation. I also thank Greg Bratman, Emily Butler, Angela Duckworth, Tammy English, Golijeh Golarai, Amit Goldenberg, Anett Gyurak, Eran Halperin, Ronnie Janoff-Bulman, Hooria Jazaieri, Sylvia Kreibig, Shreya Lakhan-Pal, Ihno Lee, Eran Magen, Maria Mateen, Kateri McRae, Andrea Samson, Gal Sheppes, Gaurav Suri, Maya Tamir, and Heather Urry for their comments on a prior version of this article.