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An emotion perspective on emotion regulation a
Batja Mesquita & Nico H. Frijda
b
a
Center for Social and Cultural Psychology, University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium b
Department of Brain and Cognition, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Version of record first published: 09 Aug 2011.
To cite this article: Batja Mesquita & Nico H. Frijda (2011): An emotion perspective on emotion regulation, Cognition & Emotion, 25:5, 782-784 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2011.586824
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COGNITION AND EMOTION 2011, 25 (5), 782784
COMMENTARY An emotion perspective on emotion regulation Batja Mesquita1 and Nico H. Frijda2 1
Center for Social and Cultural Psychology, University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium Department of Brain and Cognition, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
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2
In their balanced article, Gross, Sheppes, and Urry (this issue) argue that, ‘‘in some circumstances, the distinction between emotion generation and emotion regulation is indeed useful’’ (p. 765). We agree that this distinction can be useful. There are conditions in which emotion regulation is clearly distinguished from emotion generation, as when explicit directives for emotion regulation are given. This is the case in many experimental studies of emotion regulation, in which participants are explicitly asked to regulate their emotions. However, we would like to argue that (a) the usefulness of the distinction between emotion generation and regulation may be overestimated due to the experimental paradigms used to study emotion regulation, and (b) the distinction obscures the inherently emotional nature of much emotion regulation. Let us take the working definition of emotions in the target article as a starting point: ‘‘Emotions are generated when a personsituation transaction compels attention, has a valenced meaning to an individual, and gives rise to a coordinated yet malleable multi-system response to the ongoing personsituation transaction’’ (p. 766). We would like to propose two refinements (cf. Frijda, 1986, 2007; Mesquita, 2003). First, personsituation
transactions draw attention and have valence, to the extent that they are relevant to the individual’s concerns. A remark evokes anger if it is considered damaging for one’s social status. Second, emotional responses are indeed coordinated, namely by the motive states that we have called ‘‘states of action readiness’’. Different emotions are characterised by different states of action readiness. Being humiliated may instigate a tendency to retaliate. Thus, events that touch upon concerns elicit states of action readiness, which motivate our responses in different modalities. The raison d’eˆtre for emotions is to prioritise action readiness that benefit the concerns at stake (Oatley, 1992). Retaliation may be seen as an attempt to regain social position, or at least bring damage to the position of the person who challenged yours (Nisbett & Cohen, 1996). Central to our argument is that many real-life emotional events simultaneously touch on multiple concerns (Sonnemans & Frijda, 1995), rather than neatly mapping on just one. Our everyday emotions are not elicited by carefully selected movies or slides that elicit just anger or just endearment. More commonly, emotional events in real life have the potential of eliciting several
Correspondence should be addressed to: Batja Mesquita, Uviversity of Leuven, Center for Social and Cultural Psychology, Tiensestraat 102, 3000 Leuven. Belgium. E-mail:
[email protected] # 2011 Psychology Press, an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business http://www.psypress.com/cogemotion
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DOI:10.1080/02699931.2011.586824
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COMMENTARY ON GROSS, SHEPPES, & URRY
emotions*that is, several modes of action readiness*at the same time. We are happy as well as embarrassed when our guests sing the ‘‘Happy Birthday’’ song at our birthday party. The same event is relevant to multiple concerns, and evokes multiple modes of action readiness*happiness and embarrassment*simultaneously. The implication is that multiple motive states compete for the same output channels. Or, stated differently, multiple motive states modulate and regulate each other. We submit that this is what emotion regulation tends to look like in the complex reality of our everyday lives. Events are not neatly mapped onto distinct concerns; they are not like the standardised movies and slides psychologists and neuroscientists present to elicit emotions in their research participants. As a rule rather than an exception, real-life events touch on multiple concerns, and evoke multiple action readiness modes. For instance, risky behaviour is both scary and novel to adolescents (Crone, 2009). The reasons for emotion regulation thus tend to be emotional themselves. Emotion regulation of one emotion takes place to the extent that the other emotion gains power or intensity; that is, to the extent that the concerns of the other emotion become salient. Adolescents may only be drawn to risky behaviour when the powerful positive emotions elicited by the novelty of the situation outweigh the fear of risk (Crone, 2009). A recovering alcoholic will only abstain from the alcohol to the extent that the relief of abstaining outweighs the pains of the abstention itself (Baker, Piper, McCarthy, & Majeskie, 2004). The salience of certain emotional concerns over others may be either chronic, as when certain concerns are central to an individual or a culture, or they may be situational, as when a particular situation threatens to violate a particular concern. For example, authoritarian people are chronically sensitive to challenges of their status, honour cultures make status challenges focal (Nisbett & Cohen, 1996), and situations that highlight differential power may also bring the concern for one’s social position to the foreground. In all cases, anger and its accompanying action tendency
may take centre stage when a person’s status is challenged. Importantly, the salience of particular concerns*and emotions*also depends on the perspective taken on a particular event. Given that emotionally relevant events generally carry multiple aspects and multiple meanings, events are often appraised as relevant to several concerns, and may be so in contradictory ways. While the offensive remarks of a spouse elicit anger and hostility, for example, the spouse her or himself may still evoke affection, intimacy, and consideration. Moreover, one’s angry response is accompanied by the anticipation of the unwanted consequences of this, and thus entails a third emotion: the aversion of social discord, and of being its cause. Which of these three emotions prevails is likely to be dependent on many factors that make one or the other perspective salient. Among those the history of the relationship, i.e., how much affection the partner evokes, one’s personal sensitivity to offence, and one’s aversion (or conversely, tolerance) of marital discord, but also characteristics of the situation such as the viciousness of the insult. Which perspective is salient thus depends on appraisals that are largely automatic, and that can be made in the absence of focal attention. Yet, appraisals of which one is unaware may still implicate action inclinations and actions. We suggest that emotion regulation is often a matter of changing perspectives, that is, of changing the relative priority that different modes of action readiness gain within a situation. In conclusion, while there may be conditions under which the distinction between emotion generation and emotion regulation is useful, in many cases it is not. To the contrary, this distinction obscures why and when people change their emotions. While the authors of the target article list some different conditions under which emotion regulation would take place, they do not provide any predictions about the exact circumstances in which emotion regulation will take place. The emotional perspective on emotion regulation that we have briefly outlined here does provide this insight. Emotion regulation takes place when the same situation generates more COGNITION AND EMOTION, 2011, 25 (5)
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than one emotion, and to the extent that these emotions contradict each other. The relative strength of each of these emotions will predict the direction of regulation. We think this is the important insight to be gained by considering emotion regulation part of the emotion-generative process.
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REFERENCES Baker, T. B., Piper, M. E., McCarthy, D. E., & Majeskie, M. R. (2004). Addiction motivation reformulated: An affective processing model of negative reinforcement. Psychological Review, 111, 3351. Crone, E. (2009). Het puberende brein [The adolescent brain]. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Bert Bakker.
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Frijda, N. H. (1986). The emotions. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Frijda, N. H. (2007). The laws of emotion. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Mesquita, B. (2003). Emotions as dynamic cultural phenomena. In R. Davidson, H. Goldsmith, & K. R. Scherer (Eds.), The handbook of the affective sciences (pp. 871890). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Nisbett, R. E., & Cohen, D. (1996). Culture of honor: The psychology of violence in the South. Boulder, Co: Westview Press. Oatley, K. (1992). Best laid schemes. The psychology of emotions. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Sonnemans, J., & Frijda, N. H. (1995). The determinants of subjective emotional intensity. Cognition and Emotion, 9(5), 483506.
