Emotion Regulation

Emotion regulation is the process where people change their emotional experience. When doing it, people change how they feel and emotionally react to a situation. This process involves strategies to increase, maintain, or decrease both positive and negative emotions. First developed within clinical psychology to improve people’s emotional well-being, the study of emotion regulation has found application in understanding intergroup relations, where emotions shape political views and outcomes, aiming for conflict resolution, compromise, and reconciliation. This application has resulted in interventions that effectively apply emotion regulation strategies to mitigate hostility and foster cooperation.

Emotion regulation interventions can be divided into direct and indirect strategies. Direct emotion regulation involves strategies that deliberately regulate emotions at different stages of the emotion-generative process (situation, attention, appraisal—i.e., perceptions—and response). A common cognitive strategy is reappraisal, in which people are asked to reinterpret a situation to shift its emotional effect. Reappraisal interventions often teach people to view emotionally charged events with neutrality—like a scientist analysing data. Research shows that reappraisal reduces anger and fear, making people more tolerant and open to reconciliation, such as among Jewish Israelis toward Palestinian Israelis and in peace efforts, such as the one between the Colombian guerrilla organisation FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) and the local government.

Despite its benefits, people often resist direct emotion regulation; they may lack the motivation to regulate emotions that serve important psychological and social functions, such as reinforcing group identity, signalling strength, or justifying past actions. These challenges have prompted researchers to explore alternatives that do not require individuals to regulate their emotions consciously. This approach is called indirect emotion regulation.

In this indirect approach, the focus is on modifying broader appraisals and beliefs that can have a downstream effect on emotional experiences. Because people rarely notice how general beliefs shape their negative views and emotions towards others, they are less likely to resist these ideas. For example, shifting beliefs about group malleability—the idea that groups can change their views and behaviours over time, for instance—has been shown to increase openness to compromise and improve intergroup attitudes between Israelis and Palestinians. This makes indirect emotion regulation an effective tool for reducing negative emotions in situations of conflict, especially when motivational barriers limit people’s willingness to engage in direct regulation. Through experiments, MORES is studying various emotion regulation strategies to find out how people can protect themselves from the effects of divisive persuasive populist social media messaging.

Further Reading:

Avichail, T., Tamir, M., Gross, J. J., & Halperin, E. (2024). Using Intergroup Emotion Regulation Interventions to Reduce Intergroup Conflict. In Psychological Intergroup Interventions (pp. 99-113). Routledge.‏

Goldenberg, A., Halperin, E., Van Zomeren, M., & Gross, J. J. (2015). The process model of group-based emotion: Integrating intergroup emotion and emotion regulation perspectives. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 20(2), 118-141.

Gross, J. J. (2015). Emotion regulation: Current status and future prospects. Psychological Inquiry, 26(1), 1-26.

Halperin, E. (2014). Emotion, emotion regulation, and conflict resolution. Emotion Review, 6(1), 68-76.‏

Halperin, E., Porat, R., Tamir, M., & Gross, J. J. (2013). Can emotion regulation change political attitudes in intractable conflicts? From the laboratory to the field. Psychological Science, 24(1), 106-111.‏