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Abstract
For the last two decades, there has been growing interest in understanding how emotion regulation affects psychological and physical health of individuals. In some recent research emotion regulation has also been found to be linked to certain other important behavioural outcomes, such as relationship satisfaction and psychosocial adjustment. This has led to the recognition of emotion regulation as an important component of human development and well-being. Research findings suggest that a habitual emotional state predicts long-term health and life expectancy, and that successful emotion regulation is vital to mental health as well as physical well-being. Studies also indicate that individuals regulate their emotions in wide variety of ways some of which are healthier than others. This paper focuses on two commonly used emotion regulation strategies, namely reappraisal and suppression. Reappraisal involves changing the way one thinks about a potentially emotion-eliciting event. Suppression involves changing the way one responds behaviourally to an emotion-eliciting event. The paper reviews the findings of studies that focus on individual differences in the use of reappraisal and suppression strategies, and examines how the use of reappraisal in emotion regulation can lead to healthier patterns of affect, social functioning and well-being. The paper enumerates the positive and negative outcomes of emotion regulation strategies, and concludes that consequences of emotion regulation strategies are determined by cultural values of a person.
Key words: Emotion regulation, reappraisal, suppression, well-being.
In psychological literature emotions are often portrayed as irresistible forces. To achieve different goals of life, however, people have to manage their emotions in socially desirable ways. This management of emotions is simply referred to as emotion regulation. Emotion regulation has been linked to different important outcomes such as mental health (Gross & Munoz, 1995), physical health (Sapolasky, 2007), relationship satisfaction (Murray, 2005) and work performance (Diefendorff, Hall, Loard & Strean, 2000). These positive outcomes indicate that emotion regulation plays a vital role in our life.
Research on emotion regulation has its roots in the study of psychological defenses (Freud, 1926, 1956), psychological stress and coping (Lazarus, 1966), attachment theory (Bowlby, 1969) and emotion theory (Frijda, 1986). However, emotion regulation first gained recognition as a distinct construct in developmental psychology (Campos, Campos & Barrett, 1989; Thompson, 1990, 1991), and then in clinical psychology....