In the emerging field of emotion regulation, it has been taught that our emotions can be modulated, hopefully only after are they expressed and finally determined. I think Gross has done a good job in separating the terms of what an emotion, an emotional episode and a mood are from each other. It clarifies the picture but it also disintegrates it.
Can one definition exist without the other? Isn’t the primal question of what is an emotion further alienated from us by now defining how such emotional processes might shape the primal impulsive emotion? Can the term emotion be separated from the social, psychological, biological processes involved in attaining the final response? From this social perspective, does the definition of emotion and emotional process not seem interchangeable?
Gross has suggested a wide range of definitions to why we need to regulate our emotions, what are the processes and their benefit for our healthy acclimation in a social setting. Our capacity to adaptive, conscious coping process is the base for understanding emotional regulation. Other then my assumption that ‘let your feelings be your guide’ is the evolutionarily smarter mechanism it turns out that actually ‘he who keeps a cool head prevails’. Emotional adaptational intelligence can be quite necessary for us, not only in the context of social order, but in concern of mental health. Gross has noted a few plausible problems that might occur if non-regulation occurs: “emotion dysregulation is associated with clinical problems…sustained physiological response exceeding metabolic demand and immune suppression.” This lets us assume we should not blindly trust our emotions, which might harm us more in the long run then the suppression of the emotion at stake in the moment. His definition: “Emotion regulation must be inferred when an emotional response would have proceeded in one fashion but instead is observed to proceed in another.” Soon we discover that this is problematic as we need to first know the emotion which we will regulate; that does not necessarily always happen consciously but rather adaptively, and we may blur the two together, the initial emotion and the regulated response. (I wonder: If ego defenses occur out of awareness, why the term then? does not ‘id defenses’ suit it much better?)
He then proceeds into detail of four processes of emotional regulation:
1. Situation selection occurs when you select consciously in what situations you place yourself in, so you may avoid encountering unpleasant emotions associated with such kind of situations.
2. Situation modification is an unwanted situation in which emotional response might be provoked and we try to alter the situation in order to distance ourselves from the unwanted emotion.
3. Attentional deployment means literally shifting your emotional attention away from the situation that calls forth the unpleasant emotion; in other words distracting yourself from reality by concentrating on different tasks or ruminating in a subsequent emotional reality.
4. Cognitive change happens in the process of bonding meaning to a precept, elevating it to an emotional experience. For example when things go wrong one should ‘think positive’ this would be a cognitive reframing of a plausible unpleasant emotional situation, in order to decrease the overall negative emotions.
Last but not least he mentions, response modulation, which is directed at the ‘aftermath’ in emotional regulatory processes and tackles the response in an emotion generative situations. Regulating our behavior and response to the emotion is perhaps the most common process that is tangible to us; it is directed at modulation and emotional response, the final stages of James’s still accepted formula of emotional response tendency. It seems as though we feel we can execute more power over what we put out into the world rather then what we take upon us, in terms of emotions, emotional regulation and responding. The goal of this system is mostly context specific, matching our response to the expected social pattern.
Beyond the self-noted problematic data assimilation through interview and questionnaire methods, which is untrustworthy, there are many other unanswered perplexities in regards to this model of emotional regulation. The fact that it is all according to a ‘process model’ (emphasis mine) makes me suspicious. What about the idea that each individual has their own individual model for how they experience and deal with emotions in social context. Don’t we tend to generalize in a subject so subjective as emotional regulation? We have focused on the unwanted negative emotions but what happens when people are placed in situations in which they have to regulate positive emotions? Is this still healthy? Can such alteration eventually lead to a genetic change in emotional responsiveness? Will we ever reach a place of constant balance of emotions? Is this favorable? What would individuality mean and how could it be expressed if we would be at perfect harmonic, emotional reactivity? The question if emotional harmony can exist, might be answered once we learn to listen to our emotions, without immediately acquiring meaning to them. These multi-regulatory processes confined to a process-oriented approach is ought to bring us closer to understanding emotion regulation but I wonder if it really will, rather constrict us to a pattern, a diagram which makes a lot of sense and in a way seems oversimplified to me.
After Gross has spread the umbrella and clarified general formulation, social context of normal modes for regulation. We are invited through social neuroscience to look into the lens of specified disorders looking at structural detail and differences between individuals. The two papers are bound together through the idea that behavioral disorders are in turn the greater outcome of deregulation of emotions. By focusing on disorders it gives a better understanding of the underlying mechanisms and contributes in our understanding of what a healthy mind requires in social adaptation.
Individuals as said, differ not only in efficiency of mechanisms, but in the amount of specific mental activations when such processes as emotional regulation should take place. People with behavioral disorders might have salient parts in their emotional regulatory mechanisms. Could one understand this idea through people that experience a ‘fit’ (= an uncontrollable emotional burst), individuals who in that moment cannot regulate their emotion, as the neural mechanisms are maybe unavailable?
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3 comments:
"Contemporary physical and social environments differ dramatically from those that shaped our emotions" (Gross, 1998).
I constantly find myself thinking that emotion regulation is not necessary because why would we have emotions in the first place if they weren't evolutionarily helpful? But it's important to remember that while "emotions encode situation-response dependencies that have proven valuable ver the sweet of millennia," these tendencies are not always appropriate in the situations we face today.
On page 278, Gross drove home the point of how important these mechanisms are when we states that "emotion suppression impaired memory for auditory information that had been presented during an emotion-eliciting slide-viewing task...Baumeister found that both emotion suppression and exaggeration impaired performance on subsequent cognitive tasks such as anagram solving." Regulatory processes, as Gross shows throughout the article, are vital to our mental, emotional, and physical health. It's times like these that I find myself in awe of the human body and how we, as organisms, are constantly modifying the way we work in order to keep passing down genetic information. So cool.
I especially liked Gross' overview of the way in which emotional regulation has been addressed and also informed by the various psychological disciplines, and I have found that it's rare for any author coming from one particular psychological viewpoint to point out and give credit to the contributions of other disciplines to their topic. Articles where this does happen tend to be some of my favorites, mostly because they create a larger picture and help me to juxtapose some of the divergent ideas that I encounter in the vast range of theories and ideas we're exposed to over the course of a class or series of psychology classes. From this overview I was most fascinated with cognitive psychology's contribution regarding emotional regulation - namely that research has found that regulation of negative emotions via thought suppression actually has an inverse effect (thereby increasing negative emotions) when the "cognitive load" is high. I took their explanation to mean that when we are cognitively stressed ("lots on our mind", so to speak), our ability to locate and attend to our more positive or neutral thoughts decreases, and the less demanding process that alerts us to unwanted thoughts and feelings (negative ones) wins out, thereby making us feel worse than when the whole process began. Of course, this all happens so quickly, I doubt we even know it's what's going on, but I for one have been known to experience what I might call a "vortex" of negativity when I have a lot to think about and balance in my mind and then some slight annoyance comes along and gets me way off track. Actually, this just happened today! Thank you, conference work!
I will have to agree with Katie that the discussion of "the regulation of negative emotions via thought suppression actually having an inverse effect (thereby increasing negative emotions) when the 'cognitive load' is high" hit home today! However, I had another way of thinking about it. I feel like when i have negative emotions and the cognitive load is high, I don't have the energy to switch from negative to positive which in, itself becomes frustrating (a negative emotion) to me furthering my negative emotional state. What timing...
I also have a question that popped into my head while reading about "Emotion and Emotion Regulation" in the remaining challenges section. There is a mention of the thought that "adult emotions are almost always regulated" (286). I wonder if as we get older, our emotional regulation experiences actually alter our brains in a way that alters our emotional reaction. Instead of the idea that adults are always regulating emotions, could it not be that the experience of emotional regulation throughout life leads to emotions that need less regualtion. If this is so, it could mean that adults actually spend less 'energy' regulating emotions.
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