Handbook of Emotion Regulation

by James J. Gross (Editor)

This authoritative volume provides a comprehensive road map of the important and rapidly growing field of emotion regulation. Each of the 30 chapters in this handbook reviews the current state of knowledge on the topic at hand, describes salient research methods, and identifies promising directions for future investigation. The contributors—who are the foremost experts in the field—address vital questions about the neurobiological and cognitive bases of emotion regulation, how we develop and use regulatory strategies across the lifespan, individual differences in emotion regulation, social psychological approaches, and implications for psychopathology, clinical interventions, and health.

Genres: Psychology, Emotion, Nonfiction, Reference

654 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[Narcisa Banda · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've learned so much from this book about how emotions work and what we can do to improve our emotional life.

Here are some of the things I found most interesting:
- the fact that we can and we do control our emotions, and what are the options to do that
- the fact that we can and do regulate each other's emotions
- the way we regulate our emotions depends on emotion goals; that there is a social aspect to this, but also goals change with age
- how pathology comes from a lack of flexible use of a range of emotion regulation techniques, and how therapy basically teaches the use of new techniques

However, the reason I give this book only 3 stars is that for a non-specialist like me, this was a very tedious and difficult read. Would be great to have a version of this book for the general public, but I didn't find anything that comes close.

[Alina · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was disappointed with this collection. This is likely biased by my research interests, and for somebody else, this collection may be wonderful. (I'm giving it three stars rather than one or two out of the suspicion that others may find it more interesting.) To start off, the first half of this collection is insubstantial. There, thinkers present “neuroscientific evidence” for the basis of forms of emotion regulation. I don’t trust most of the sorts of claims there, for we have too little idea about what certain areas of the brain are “specialized” for (or even if it’s a well-formed question to ask after the sorts of functions that get hypothesized), or how activation across certain areas may “combine.” Below, I sum up the few chapters that I found interesting enough to read.

In chapter 7 “Executive function” by Zelazo & Cunningham, the authors propose that cognitive psychological research on executive functions can be applied to understanding emotion regulation. This chapter was interesting to me from a sociological angle. It looks like the idea of executive functions in this discipline is grounded in the kind of thought processes utilized in a specific kind of task: one that is wholly novel to the subject and whose successful completion requires that one abide to a certain set of rules (e.g., puzzle solving, word matching.) I can imagine that this is partial and doesn’t cover most of what we intuitively consider to be deliberate or reflective thought in everyday life. In these cases, we come to reflect upon something because something has been bothering or following us for a while, and we’ve reached a point where we have to orientate ourselves towards it anew (e.g., because it raises too significant of a challenge.) So both the “problem” at hand is familiar, rather than discontinuous with our practical interests, and is not rule-based. It seems that regulating our emotions is solidly in this category of the familiar and not rule based, so I was puzzled by the authors’ ideas on this chapter, which consisted in summarizing findings in this neighborhood of literature, and then barely making connections with it and emotion.

In chapter 10 “Conflict monitoring in cognition-emotion competition” by McClure et al., the authors argue that findings in psychological research on paradigmatic tasks in which cognitive processes are at odds (e.g., resisting temptation; long term planning) can be applied to understanding emotion regulation. In the authors’ words, intra-cognitive conflict is similar to inter-cognitive conflict with emotion. I found the theorizing here strange and misleading. There is no reflective discussion here on why certain theorists prefer one definition of cognition and of emotion over another. Under different definitions, the same task may be understood as involving intra- v. inter-cognitive conflicts. This definitional issue is not insignificant. Different framings can lead to different ways of setting up experimental tasks and of theorizing about findings (e.g., if resisting a temptation is understood as primarily emotional, and emotion is understood as involving cognition and perception in certain ways, there could be more interesting set-ups regarding ways of modulating how one is cognitively primed, or how the tempting action is set up perceptually to the subjects, for assessing the power of impact of such changes relative to one another.)

In chapter 11 “Caregiver influences on emerging emotion regulation” by Calkins & Hill, the authors summarize findings on how infants and toddlers regulate emotions. They also theorize that the emotion regulation of which they are capable is continuous with the strategies that adults use. For example, 3 month old infants are capable of self-soothing behaviors, like babbling or sucking their thumb, and at 6 months, they become capable of voluntarily shifting their attention from distressing cues to positive ones. Adults still control their attention and find soothing activities to regulate their emotions. There was interesting empirical work summed up in this chapter, but nothing new or nothing that goes beyond what we already know through common sense.

The most interesting chapter in this collection is 23 “Interpersonal emotion regulation” by Rime. There, the author argues that emotional events have long-lasting impact on us cognitively and socially, and we deal with this impact by talking about our emotions with others. This is not always effective; there is evidence that people with trauma who can’t stop talking about their traumatic memories do not get relief from their suffering any more than those who don’t share their pasts. As a whole, an impression I have is that the sorts of studies conducted to assess the sorts of claims made in this chapter are underdetermined or too noisy to be useful. I also thought it was silly for the author to make their claims and findings seemingly more profound or baffling than need be. It’s not that we spontaneously feel compelled to talk about our emotions. Our “emotions” often refer to just significant events that’ve happened to us, and it is common sense that when some significant change has occurred in our lives, we need to process it, and we often process things by talking to others. Framed in this more common sense manner, this opens questions that are perhaps more theoretically fruitful: What sorts of conditions modulate whether we receive the clarity or reinforcement of an idea we wish to believe in, when we talk about something that is uncertain or that troubles us? (e.g., conditions like how much we trust the other person or how much authority we deem them to have seem like good candidates.)

As a whole, it seems that the vast majority of thinkers in this collection understand emotion regulation as a topic whose investigation should consist in starting off with what we know about emotion, and applying that theorizing onto this question of how we regulate our emotions. I disagree with this approach. I’ve been playing around with the idea that understanding emotion regulation may come conceptually prior to defining emotion, that this direction of approach is crucial methodologically. I could diagnose my dissatisfaction with this collection by this inversion of the proper methodological direction; the consequence is that there are no new or interesting claims about emotion or emotion regulation, but there are rather just bodies of studies cited to support common sense ideas about either topic.

[Brandon · Rating 4 out of 5]

This text is not for casual reading or a brief overview of emotion regulation. The text is in-depth, research-oriented, and technical. However, this book is excellent for what it aims to be. I have found the book to provide an excellent amount of information to inform treatment.

[Erika · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have a chapter in this one, so I'm biased! Actually, it's pretty good.

[Gary]

(see Sapolsky chapter)

[Linda · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reading the definition of "emotion regulation" in every chapter was unnecessary. A lot of the content of this book could have been portrayed in half the number of pages.

[CEHD at the U of M]

Philip David Zelazo, contributor.