Trends in Cognitive Sciences
Feature ReviewSpecial Focus on EmotionThe Social Regulation of Emotion: An Integrative, Cross-Disciplinary Model
Section snippets
Beyond the Individual: The Social Regulation of Emotion
Whether we are angry about a disagreement at work, struggling after a breakup, or saddened by the loss of a loved one, the ability to regulate our emotions is essential for maintaining mental health, social functioning, and physical well-being. The past twenty years have seen enormous growth in research on emotion regulation [1]. For the most part this work has focused on the ability of an individual to self-regulate their emotions. Experiments have examined how specific regulatory strategies
The SRC
To date, emotion regulation research has focused primarily on how people manage their own emotions. While the majority of self-regulatory attempts occur in social contexts [26] and have ramifications for social functioning (Box 1), self-regulation is distinct from the social regulation of emotion. Social regulation occurs when one person seeks to alter the emotional responses of another person. Instead of merely suggesting regulatory strategies to others, social emotion regulators pursue
Social Regulation from the Perspective of the Regulator
Regulators engage a complex set of cognitive and affective processes to infer the emotions of a target, to decide whether to regulate, weigh potential strategies, and ultimately implement one (Figure 2, Key Figure). While no studies have directly examined relevant neural systems in the context of social regulation per se, for each stage we discuss likely neural systems supporting the SRC (Figure 3).
Social Regulation from the Perspective of the Target
In the SRC (Figure 2), targets engage a sequence of processing steps to generate the emotional response that in turn initiates their dynamic interplay with regulators. Because this emotion-generation sequence has been well-studied and described elsewhere [1], we will discuss its elements briefly and focus on ways in which emotion generation differs in the context of social regulation as compared to self-regulation. Perhaps the most important differences revolve around how targets attend to and
Concluding Remarks and Future Directions
Drawing on research from multiple fields, the present review proposes an integrative and comprehensive framework of the social regulation of emotion that can organize and guide behavioral and neuroscience research. This working framework posits a dynamic, interactive SRC as a model of the social regulation of emotion. The value of the SRC derives in part from the common language and reference frame it provides for multiple disciplines – ranging from developmental, social, and organizational
Acknowledgments
Completion of the manuscript was supported by grants AG043463 from NIA, HD069178 from NICHD, and MH090964 from NIMH awarded to K.O.
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