Is Social Regulation of Emotions a Critical Component of Everyday Functioning?
A successful positive developmental trajectory is characterized by acquiring numerous social and emotional competencies. A key component of positive development is learning to self-regulate one’s emotions.
Emotion regulation is defined as attempts to influence the types of emotions an individual experiences, when and how those emotions are experienced and then expressed.
Emotion regulation is a process that alters the dynamics of an emotional response, not its quality
In other words, emotion regulation includes all conscious and unconscious strategies used to increase, maintain, or decrease feelings, behaviors, and/or physiological responses associated with an emotional response. As such, emotional regulation can be conceived of as a strategy-employment process that alters the dynamics of an emotional response, not its quality.
Social Regulation
Before we apply this to social dynamics, let’s clarify a key term: psychological entropy.
To do so, first, we must clarify the term entropy.
Entropy describes the amount of uncertainty and disorder nested within systems. Thus, psychological entropy refers to the uncertainty and disorder within cognitive systems.
Self-organizing and self-regulatory systems like humans must adapt to environmental and circumstantial changes so as to keep internal entropy manageable (Hirsh et al., 2012). This, however, is no small task as the environment is infinitely more complex than any single individual can manage alone, and as a result much of internal behavior regulation is outsourced to other people.
Indeed, people often lack insight into their own emotional responses, leading to a misattribution of an event, which in turn highlights the importance of social regulation. Moreover, effective emotion regulation is critical for mental health, social functioning, and well-being (Reeck et al., 2016).
Social regulation of emotions refers to one individual (the regulator) attempting to change the emotional response of another individual (the target). Reeck and colleagues (2016) introduce an integrative model called the ‘social regulatory cycle’ which has been proposed to understand the psychological and neural processes underlying this process. Their model includes four stages: identification, evaluation, strategy selection, and implementation.
In the identification stage, the regulator infers the target’s emotions through their expressive behaviors and external context. The evaluation stage involves assessing the need for social regulation by comparing the target’s current emotional state to a desired state/goal. The strategy selection stage involves deciding whether or not to regulate the target’s emotions or leave it to someone else, and if regulation is selected, which strategy to use. The implementation stage then involves using strategies to change the target’s emotional response, including situation selection and modification, attentional deployment, cognitive change, and response modulation.
Summary
Emotion regulation refers to strategies that increase, maintain, or decrease feelings, behaviors, and/or physiological responses associated with an emotional response. Emotion regulation alters the dynamics of an emotional response but not its quality. Social regulation of emotions can have both positive and negative effects on the relationship between the regulator and the target, depending on the match between the regulatory strategy and the target’s needs and goals, as well as the target’s perceptions of the regulator’s competence and benevolence.
Implication of Social Regulation of Emotions
Understanding the mechanisms underlying social regulation of emotion is important to improve relationships between regulators and targets. This, in turn, bolsters social relationships, improves the self-regulatory capacity of both parties in a social relationship, and facilitates each party’s ability to assist the other in tackling the infinite complexity of our environment (cf. psychological entropy).
Our environment is complex and uncertain. Humans appear to delegate their emotional regulation to other people (cf. social regulation), as doing so in isolation is far too complicated.
References
Hirsh, J. B., Mar, R. A., & Peterson, J. B. (2012). Psychological entropy: a framework for understanding uncertainty-related anxiety. Psychological review, 119(2), 304–320. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0026767
Reeck, C., Ames, D. R., & Ochsner, K. N. (2016). The Social Regulation of Emotion: An Integrative, Cross-Disciplinary Model. Trends in cognitive sciences, 20(1), 47–63. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2015.09.003
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