Emotion Regulation: transforming step for Life(part-1)

Emotion Regulation: transforming step for Life(part-1)

If your emotional abilities aren't in hand, if you don't have self-awareness, if you are not able to manage your distressing emotions, if you can't have empathy and have effective relationships, then no matter how smart you are, you are not going to get very far. 
                                         -Daniel Goleman

We do a lot with our emotions, other than just feel them.Indeed, as if the sheer experience of emotions wasn't enough — the crushing weight of sadness, the maddening of anger, the solace of serenity, and the grace of gratitude — we tend to spend a lot of resources on the pre- and post-production of our emotional storylines.

We pick our favorites (joy), and seek all chances of running into them. And we have our foes, penciled in ominous red (fear), to be avoided at all costs. And when these foes inevitably show up at our doors, we do everything to turn them away. We resist them. We deny them. We fight them. We reason with them. We redirect and reshape them. But they loiter and linger, watching us labor with their aftermaths until, suddenly, they tip their hats to their ill-mannered hosts and leave.Although it may sometimes feel like they strike us out of the blue, emotions unfold over time.

Emotion regulation is the conscious or non-conscious control of emotion, mood, or affect. Conscious control is an active thought process or a commitment to a behavior to control your emotion, also known as a coping mechanism. Non-conscious control means thoughts and behaviors you don't control, like temperament and how some people are just not very emotional. When we say 'emotions', we mean single emotions that are easy to define but rarely occur in isolation, like anger or sadness. Mood is an emotional state, and something which affect and emotions are built on. Sort of like when you are in a bad or good mood and everything else is built off of that. Affect is the description of a person's immediate emotional state, such as angry, ashamed, or flustered.

According to the Process Model of Emotion Regulation,we can interfere with emotional processes at different points during the emotion generation timeline using different strategies. For instance, before the emotional reaction is activated, we can target the selection and modification of the situation (for example, avoiding dreaded situations), our attention to the situation (for example, looking somewhere else), and the way we frame its meaning (for example, downplaying negative events). Once the emotion is on its way, we can alter our behavioral or physiologicalresponse to it (for example, smiling when feeling fearful).

Reappraisal is cognitive in nature, which means that it involves how people think about and reframe emotional situations. It’s considered to be a positive type of emotion regulation, because it is flexible and because it transforms the whole emotion, rather than just one piece of it. Reappraisal is associated with lower levels of depression and greater levels of well-being.

Suppression, in contrast, is basically still experiencing the emotion, but inhibiting its behavioral expressions. It is considered to be a more negative type of emotion regulation. One reason is that the experience part of the emotion still persists. Another reason is more transactional in nature. It creates an asymmetry between how a person feels and what other people see, and that’s thought to be related to negative social processes.

Research has shown that people who use reappraisal strategies are able to reframe stressful situations by reinterpreting the meaning of negative emotional stimuli. They deal with challenging situations by taking a proactive role in restoring their moods and in adopting more positive attitudes. These efforts are often rewarded with more positive and less negative emotions, as well as resilience, better social ties, greater self-esteem, and general life satisfaction.

Suppression, on the other hand, only affects the behavioral response of emotions, and does little to reduce their actual experience. It’s thought to be cognitively and socially costly — it takes continuous effort to control and suppress emotions — and can create feelings of inauthenticity. Studies have shown that people who used suppression were less able to repair their negative moods, despite “masking” their inner feelings. They experienced fewer positive emotions and more negative emotions, and had less life satisfaction and less self-esteem.

Emotional acceptance is a stance of perceiving that one is emotional, but deciding not to do anything about it, i.e., not to alter the emotion. Somewhat paradoxically, emotional acceptance is related to decreased negative emotions, as well as resilience. Thus, the absence of emotion regulation can sometimes have the best emotion regulatory function. For example, people who accept their negative emotions when they are stressed out experience less negative emotions than people who don't accept their emotions. It’s one of the core processes of mindfulness, which involves a number of different psychological processes. One of them is aware of your emotional and psychological states, and the other one is non-reactance or acceptance, which could also be thought of as the absence of emotion regulation.

A stance of emotional acceptance — acknowledging your emotions and not being threatened by them — and the knowledge that you can, if you want to, cognitively transform them.

It is important to understand that the emotion itself – be it anger, fear, sadness, or joy – is not the “enemy.” There is no such thing as a “bad emotion” anymore than there is a “good emotion.” Emotions can have the consequence of making you feel good or bad, but it is often the interpretation of the emotion and the way that you respond to the emotion that creates this subjective experience.