Emotion regulation choice: Selecting between cognitive regulation strategies to control emotion

Abstract

Although emotions have a strong impact, individuals have a remarkable ability to control or regulate them in various ways. Choosing between these various regulatory options in a manner that suits situational demands, has been recently strongly linked to well-being and mental health. Despite its clear importance, emotion regulation choice remained unexplored until recently. This paper describes a recent conceptual framework that represents a classic example of cognition-emotion interaction, where deliberate executive control processes modulate the influence of competing associative emotion generative processes. The utilization of this conceptual framework to explain central influencing factors and underlying mechanisms of emotion regulation choice entails an interdisciplinary intersection of affective science and decision making. © 2013 Sheppes and Levin.