Verified by 
Do something for me, will you? Grab a piece of paper and note every feeling you can recall over the past hour. Every nagging worry about your life, every pulse of pleasure at a new text, every blush of nostalgia or enthusiasm at thoughts of the past or the future.
If you're able to recall the last hour in detail, I'd wager that this list is fairly long. Our lives are full of emotional moments. Some of these emotions are entirely appropriate to the situation and we can enjoy them - such as sharing a laugh with a friend. Others are inappropriate to either the situation or your goals and need to be managed - such as dampening your job worry in order to respond enthusiastically to a child's anecdote.
For some time, psychologists have been studying how people regulate their emotions and which techniques lead to the best success. This work often involves asking people to come into the lab, where we evoke emotion by exposing them to emotional pictures or film clips or stressful tasks like speech-giving. We then ask them to manage or regulate their emotions using one specific approach, and then we examine whether people who are successful at doing so score higher on measures of well-being (happiness, satisfaction with life) and lower on measures of psychological ill-health (depression, anxiety) than people who are unsuccessful in changing their emotions.
This work is important and has revealed very interesting patterns (you can read about some of this work in my previous post about emotions in the wake of disaster), but there is increasing evidence that this approach may be overly simplistic. In particular, we need to begin to consider the contexts in which people are changing their emotions - what type of emotions are they regulating? what are their expectations of success? how do they respond when they're not successful? what are the techniques they tend to use in their daily lives?
This increasing evidence that contextual factors are important led me and fellow psychologist Phil Opitz to invite several researchers active in this area to the annual meeting of the Society for Psychophysiological Research to share some of their latest results.
Without further ado, here is that hot-off-the-presses research, organized by the factors examined:
Expectations (of Pain) Matter
In the first of the four talks, Leonie Koban of the Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Lab at University of Colorado Boulder presented some work she had conducted with Tor Wager on social and learning influences on pain. Participants were exposed to painful heat stimulation on their forearm that varied from low to medium to high intensity. Whether these stimulations were low/medium or medium/high in heat was predicted by a cue on a screen and participants had to learn how much pain to expect based on these cues. In addition, they were also presented with the pain ratings of several other people. Interestingly, only some participants explicitly learnt which of these cues predicted low and which predicted high upcoming heat. They then rated for themselves how painful each of these touches were. Leonie also measured the degree to which these people's skin sweat when experiencing the pain, which provides a more objective measure of how much pain they registered at the touch.
Intriguingly, Leonie found that both people's pain reports and their body's response to the pain (skin sweating) was predicted by how much pain people expected to feel, based on the social information they saw in the beginning. Therefore, the context in which you are responding to a painful event may govern how you experience an event. Expectations matter.
Intensity of Emotion Matters
Next, Phil Opitz presented data that we collected together with Heather Urry of the Emotion, Brain, and Behavior Laboratory at Tufts University. He shared information collated from four different studies in which participants were shown emotional pictures and trained in one particular emotion regulation strategy and told to change their emotions using only that one strategy. The strategy they were told to use was cognitive reappraisal, or rethinking the meaning or interpretation of an emotional event in order to alter its emotional impact (for example, telling yourself that it doesn't matter that you've been laid off a job you didn't enjoy because this is an opportunity to chase your dreams instead).
At the end of each of these four studies, we asked participants to describe what they actually did to manage their emotions. We coded these descriptions as to the type and number of strategies people employed. For instance, someone who said, "I too some deep breaths and thought about what I was planning to do that night instead of thinking about the picture" would be coded as having used two strategies - one involving their physical response and one involving distraction.
Phil presented evidence suggesting that participants in the studies that used more intense images (such as accidents, injuries) more frequently reported using multiple strategies, and using multiple strategies was associated with poorer success changing their emotions. In contrast, participants in the studies that used less intense images (such as sad people, poverty) less frequently reported using multiple strategies, but using more strategies was associated with better success.
We interpret these results as evidence that the intensity of emotion is important in understanding the relationships between strategy use and emotion regulation success.
Success versus Failure Matters
Rather than focusing solely on emotion regulation success, Lara Vujovic of Tufts University asked the important question: What happens when people try to regulate their emotions and fail? She devised a picture task where participants were given the opportunity to end the emotional situation - they could press a button to make the distressing picture go away. She likened this to leaving an emotional stituation when things get too tense - such as ending an upsetting telephone call. However, some of the time, the picture *didn't* disappear when the participant pressed a button - their attempt to change the situation failed. Critically, when participants' attempts to end the situation failed, they were more likely to report distracting themselves instead - an effect that wasn't observed when the picture disappeared as intended. Lara interprets this finding in light of theories that when people try and fail to change their emotions, they may compensate by switching to a different strategy.
Controllability of Stress (Controllable vs. Uncontrollable) Matters
Finally, Allison Troy of Franklin & Marshall College took an innovative approach to studying contextual influences on emotion regulation by first examining how well people used cognitive reappraisal in the laboratory, and then following them into their daily lives to see if there was a relationship between lab ability and dealing with real-life stressors. She did this by having her participants complete daily diaries about the types of stressful events they encountered and how they emotionally reacted to them.
Intriguingly, she found that this relationship varied based on whether the stressful event was controllable or uncontrollable - for events that participants had little control over, better reappraisal ability predicted lower emotional reactivity. However, for events that participants DID have control over, better reappraisal ability predicted *worse* reactivity. Why might this be? Allison proposes that when you can't do anything about the stressful event, it is healthy to rethink the nature of the situation in a more optimistic light. This confirms traditional thinking about reappraisal ability. However, it may be that when something bad happens and there IS a way to better the situation, it is healthier to act differently rather than think differently. Reframing your thinking may get in the way of making changes that would have a better impact on your emotion.
~~~
Collectively, these new research investigations provide compelling support for the idea that if we are to truly understand the complicated relationships among emotions, their regulation, and psychological health, we need to consider the role of context.
As affective scientist and fellow PT blogger Amelia Aldao puts it in her review for Perspectives on Psychological Science, the future of emotion regulation research may well be "considering context".
