Definitions of Emotion Regulation

Definitions of Emotion Regulation

(Site) defines emotion regulation as the non-conscious or conscious control of mood, affect, or emotion. Conscious control is the active process of thought or the commitment to a specific behaviour which helps one control their emotion, also referred to as a coping mechanism. Non-conscious control, on the other hand, refers to the behaviours and thoughts which humans do not control, such as temperament and how others are not emotional (not showing sadness or anger). The other definition given by (site) is the ability to modulate and manage emotions better. Gross and Thompson (2007) consider emotion regulation to be a deliberate or automatic application of strategies to start and maintain, as well as to display or modify emotion. These authors say that emotion regulation is a process through which people non-consciously or consciously monitor their emotions, which are experienced, and they develop strategies to change or maintain the emotions at levels they desire.

Strategies for Emotion Regulation

According to (site), the popular approach of emotion regulation is what is known as a coping mechanism. This method allows individuals to cope with painful or overwhelming emotions. Health or positive emotional regulation includes activities like walking backward or counting up to ten when one is angry or talking with close friends, meditating or journaling when a person is upset. The healthy approaches encourage a person to think past their emotion and use the strategies again, avoiding causing harm. Meanwhile, unhealthy or negative emotion regulation includes activities like substance abuse or drinking alcohol, lashing out, and denial. These activities can result in personal injury or harm to others and can drive friends away. Research indicates that negative emotions often lead people to avoid dealing with their issues (site).

Functions of emotion regulation

(Site) say that the function of emotion regulation is to increase the chance of a person’s reproductive or survival success. According to these researchers, emotion regulation operates in a manner that makes it possible for a person to overcome or address problems. For instance, when a person is afraid of enemies or predators, he or she shows an adaptive behaviour. As a result, the person’s experience of fear makes them more avoidant and vigilant, and escape attack or predation. Additionally, emotion regulation increases one’s capacity for social survival (Giffiths and Scarantino, 2009). These researchers focused on the functional evaluation of emotion. They emphasised that the process of emotion regulation provides humans with the ability to enhance social bonds, overcome or address social issues like power loss or social exclusion. The main argument by Griffiths and Scarantino (2009) is that the process of emotion regulation is crucial to the social well-being as the experienced emotions help people maintain and form social relationships or affiliation function and to maintain or establish social positions, as well as preserve their self-esteem, power, and identity. These researchers claim that the functions show the significance of the balance between establishing and maintaining harmonious and close relations without getting rid of the health and secure self-sense.

Gender differences in emotion regulation

Gross (2007) claims that there are definite conceptions of gender parity with regard to emotion regulation. First, this researcher says that women and men show a comparable decrease in the experiences of negative emotion. According to Gross (2007), men have a low increase in regions of the brain that are linked to reappraisal, prefrontal regions. Additionally, men have a decreased amygdala that is linked to emotion regulation or responding. Men, as compared to women, also show a lesser engagement of their ventral striatal regions that are linked to reward processing. In conclusion, the researcher claim that men expend lesser effort as compared to women during cognitive regulation because of the automatic regulation of their emotion. Another difference is that women have been linked to applying positive emotions in reappraising their negative emotions to higher levels as compared to men.

Emotional Regulation in Sport

According to Beedie et al. (2010) and Hanin (2010), athletes often experience emotions after and before completion. These researchers say that the athletes’ emotions are often associated with performance. According to Devonport et al. (2005), the right emotional responses can usually benefit athletes, for instance, by reducing the risk of injury or by lowering the risk of the athlete’s losing their self-control (Hagger et al., 2010). Research shows that it is vital psychologically for athletes to have the ability to control their emotions. Lazarus (2000) says that emotions are experienced feelings that are subjective and which usually occur in response to incidences to either the mind or the environment. This author says that emotions often incorporate different forms of reactions, including behavioural such as aggression towards others, cognitive shown through a change in attention and perception, and physiological, which occurs through things like a higher heart rate.

According to Baumeister et al. (2007), emotions can influence motivations and goals. They can also be functional, for instance, fear and anger, which can make people tackle the root causes of their emotions by either flight or fight. Research has also found that emotions can be dysfunctional, for instance, when an athlete is angry concerning officials’ decisions, where the athlete knows that their aggressive behaviours can lead to the team or the player being penalised. In such a situation, maintaining the emotion can fail to facilitate better of improved performance. Such discrepancies between the desired and the current emotion require the use of emotion regulation (Tamir, 2009). Tamir (2009) says that there are two primary motives behind emotion regulation. These are instrumental and hedonic. According to Tamir (2009), an athlete who is feeling angry or tense can go to practice to relax. The motivation behind this decision is the hope of feeling relaxed or better, and as such, they regulate emotions because of hedonic reasons. Additionally, Tamir (2009) says that if the same team understands that their better performance is linked to feeling angry, they can use imagery or memories to induce anger to up-regulate their emotion of anger before the start of the game. Tamir (2009) says that this kind of emotion regulation is because of instrumental reasons; that is, the motivation to apply emotions to reach the desired objective.