8. Emotional Regulation Flashcards
What is emotional regulation?
- initiating one’s state orbehavior
- inhibiting one’s state orbehavior
- modulating one’s state orbehavior
Which of the following does emotional regulation apply to: Subjective experience Cognitive responses Emotion-related physiological responses Emotion related-behaviour
All of the above
What can emotional regulation training programmes achieve?
Emotional regulation and impulse control
What is down regulation?
The ability to decrease our emotional responses
Emotional regulation involves changes in emotional responding, the ****, **** and *** of emotion
What, when, and how
Gross (1998), what is the process model of emotional regulation?
Gross describes five families related to the dynamics of the emotional process in which regulation may occur: situation selection, situation modification, attention deployment, cognitive change and response modulation
Situation selection Situation modification Attention deployment Cognitive change Response modulation - what are these?
Components in the process model of emotional regulation
In the process model of emotional regulation, what is meant by situation selection?
Refers to approaching or avoiding certain people, places, or objects in order to regulate emotions
What is required in order to perform situation selection?
Self-knowledge
A shy person’s efforts to decrease anxiety by avoiding social situations may
provide short-term relief at the cost of longer term what?
Social isolation
In the process model of emotional regulation, what is meant by situation modification?
Represents active efforts to directly modify the situation and to alter its emotional impact
Emotion expressions are a potent means of changing ongoing social interaction. If one’s partner suddenly looks sad, this can shift the trajectory of an angry interaction as one pauses to express concern - in the process model of emotional regulation, what is this and example of?
Situation modification
In the process model of emotional regulation, what is meant by attentional deployment?
Strategies for changing attentional focus including distraction, concentration, rumination
In the process model of emotional regulation, what is meant by cognitive change?
Cognitive change refers to selecting which of the many possible meanings will be attached to a situation
In the process model of emotional regulation, which component involves denial or reappraisal response?
Cognitive change
In the process model of emotional regulation, what is meant by response modulation?
Refers to directly influencing physiological, experiential, or behavioral responding
When does response modulation occur in the process model of emotional regulation?
It occurs late in the emotion generative process, after response tendencies have been initiated
Response modulation can include taking up behaviours such as exercise, medication, or medication, but it does not guarantee that the experience of the emotion will be significantly changed. Attempts at response modulation can also lead to negative behaviours, such as…?
Substance abuse, comfort eating etc.
Emotion regulation strategies target three main emotion-generating systems, what are they?
Attention, knowledge, body
What are the three main emotion regulation stategies?
Need oriented, goal oriented, person oriented
Need-oriented/attention: what is Repressive coping?
The avoidance of negative stimuli - for example averting gaze from unpleasant stimuli, or spending less time reading negative feedback
What does need-oriented regulation deal with?
It is driven by people’s needs to experience rewarding states, often deals with the avoidance of situations in the now with no considerations of long-term goals
How do repressors serve as relief from emotional distress?
The provide relief in the short-term but in the long-term they posses less insight into their own emotional states
Who was the first to identify knowledge related emotion regulation strategies? Clue: he introduced the notion of psychological defense mechanisms such as repression
Freud
In social psychology, Festinger’s (1957) pioneering work on what concept has inspired a large body of research on interpretive and defensive biases?
Cognitive dissonance reduction
What is defensive bias?
We use it as an emotion regulator, it includes selective criticism of threatening information, selectively forgetting, self serving attributions etc.
What is an example of need-oriented emotion regulation (body)?
Eating
Stress induced eating is a common emotion regulation strategy, partly explained by what?
Attention - binge eating may down regulate emotional distress by focusing people’s attention on their immediate physical sensations
What do goal oriented emotional regulation strategies involve?
Up regulation and down regulation of emotional states in order to achieve specific goals and tasks (e.g. staying calm and collected during social interaction).
Goal-oriented emotion regulation (attention): emotional states spontaneously activated emotion-congruent cognitions in working memory, how might this processing steam be interrupted?
By loading working memory with an alternative task
Goal-oriented emotion regulation (knowledge): what is cognitive reappraisal?
An emotion regulation strategy that draws on cognitive control and executive functioning to reframe stimuli or situations within the environment to change their meaning and emotional valence
Which regions are inhibited during reappraisal processes?
The amygdala and insula
Which regions are activated during reappraisal processes?
Dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and prefrontal cortex
Goal-oriented emotion regulation (body): what is expressive suppression?
In this strategy, people actively inhibit their emotional expressions. E.g. a person might try to keep a straight faces
What do person-oriented emotion regulation strategies involve?
They promote flexibility in personality functioning and promote coherence and long-term stability of the personality system
What are the features of person-oriented emotion regulation?
They have a holistic focus, are sensitive to context, and integrated
Person-oriented emotion regulation (attention): what is meant by attentional counter-regulation?
This is a strategy that helps to restore a balance receptiveness to positive and negative information despite active emotional and motivational states e.g. meditation
How might one use person-oriented knowledge strategies to regulate emotion?
By using cognitive integration processes, in which emotionally charged information becomes incorporated into larger networks of the person experiences. E.g. Expressive writing
What category of emotional regulatory strategies would voluntary deep breathing fall under?
Person-oriented emotion regulation (body)
What were the findings of Millgram et al (2015)? ‘Sad as a matter of choice?’ Clue: The tested the hypothesis that predicts deficits in emotion regulation may also be related to emotion regulation goals
In three studies, clinically depressed participants were more likely than non-depressed participants to use emotion regulation strategies in a direction that was likely to maintain or increase their level of sadness
The findings demonstrate that maladaptive emotion regulation may be linked not only to the means people use to regulate their emotions, but also to the ends toward which those means are directed - what paper is this from?
Millgram et al. (2015). Sad as a matter of choice? Emotion-regulation goals in depression
In Millgram et al (2015), which group of participants wanted to see the sad images again?
The depressed individuals
Sheppes et al (2011) emotion-regulation choice: They wanted to find out which emotional regulation strategies people use in different contexts - what were their findings?
Healthy individuals manage their emotions by flexibly switching between different emotion regulation strategies
- When the intensity of negative information is low they prefer engagement reappraisal which allows emotional processing
- When the intensity of negative information is high they prefer disengagement distraction which blocks emotional processing at an early stage
What is Mnenomic emotion regulation an umbrella term for?
Instances in which people attempt to alter the nature of their memories in order to influence the experience or expression of emotions
Why is forgetting not necessarily a bad thing?
It may help emotion regulation in healthy individuals by making negative memories of some past mistakes and distressing events less accessible, limiting destructive influences of the past, and making room for a focus on positive memories
