Talk:Emotional self-regulation

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 14 September 2020 and 17 December 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Oliviaherzog.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 20:41, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

In non-humans
Might be interesting to include non-human, possibly self-soothing, behaviors (e.g. cats purring and cleaning themselves).--TyrS (talk) 06:59, 1 January 2011 (UTC)

Health implications of ER strategies
This article already mentions the importance of a healthy ER. But I think this needs to be elaborated on a little more. I think a new heading that talks about the health implications of emotion regulation would be a helpful - I feel this issue is important enough to have it's own heading. What are the consequences for using a healthy ER strategy (i.e. cognitive reappraisal) versus a less healthy ER strategy (i.e., suppression). Cognitive reappraisal has been shown to increase subjective, physiological and experience negative affect. It has also been shown to reduce rumination of negative thoughts and reduce depression. On the other hand, the suppression of emotions can lead to many negative health consequences such as cardiovascular, respiratory disorders, gastrointestinal disorders, etc.

I think it's important to make the distinction here because certain types of emotion self-regulation can be quite beneficial, while others can be deleterious. Majobc11 (talk) 22:28, 1 March 2012 (UTC)

Objectivity / Alternative views
Whilst being a term I am not fully aquainted with, the article certainly strikes the tone of expounding a particular point of view (or prevailing tendency), without strictly explaining or identifying either alternate views, the origin (academically) of the term or specific critiques within its individual subheadings. I take the the view that while appearing fairly comprehenhensive and certainly outside my areas of expertise, the article appears to lack objectivity. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.145.32.111 (talk) 22:32, 5 March 2012 (UTC)


 * I agree. I'm a little more familiar with this field and the author is not interpreting the research objectively.  For example, stating that certain reappraisal strategies are "better" than others is unreasonable because in some situations an individual doesn't have a choice about which reappraisal strategies are available to them.  It's fair to talk about the outcomes of each of the strategies, but it is not objective to say that one is "better" than the other. Majobc11 (talk) 03:26, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

Psych 2410A at Kings 2012
I have decided to edit this article for Psych 2410A at Kings 2012. Rwaring58 (talk) 02:18, 20 September 2012 (UTC)
 * Welcome! I'll be following you and help if you need it.  Lova Falk     talk   18:20, 20 September 2012 (UTC)


 * Welcome from me too! It needs it. See my comment to Lova Falk (User_talk:Lova_Falk). James James 173 (talk) 18:50, 20 September 2012 (UTC)


 * Thank you both for welcoming me here. This is my first time editing/adding to a wikipedia article, so your feedback and/or advice will be most welcome. I think I must first clear up that I will not (at least over the time frame of the course I am doing this for) be able to edit and/or change everything in this article that requires improvement (there seem to be many of these areas, and I am a busy student). The areas that I do hope to work on/improve (for the time being) are as follows: 1) I plan to add information from the Journal Article: "The Miniaturization of Expression in the Development of Emotional Self-Regulation" (Author: Manfred Holodynski, Date: Jan. 2004). In brief, this article looks at the development of expression miniaturization in solitary conditions among children aged 6-8. 2) I wish to try and add in some information on how types of self-regulation can differ across cultures (as that seems to be lacking in the current article). 3) I plan on (to the best of my abilities) making the formatting of the article easier to follow (right now it just seems like a bunch a paragraphs have been thrown together, resulting in an article that flows poorly). This formatting may include the editing of sections to make them read better, the trimming down of sections that are too long (some of the sections seem to take up way too much space for the information they provide), and changes to some of the headings (so that they better describe what is in the sections). Feel free to suggest other specific areas for me to try and tackle (hopefully I will have the time for them) Rwaring58 (talk) 01:44, 4 October 2012 (UTC)


 * I have finished the edits that will be part of my class project on this page. These edits included the description of Holodynski's experiment, the retitling of "Scherbatykh's experiment" to "Self-Regulation of Emotional Stress", along with a rewrite of that section and its movement to a different part of the article. The final change was the addition of a few pieces of information about the development of emotional self-regulation in early childhood. (As you can probably see, not all of these changes were what I laid out in the above text). As far as these changes go, feel free to comment about their applicability and on whether or not you feel they made the article better. This was an interesting topic (and an interesting first experience with wikipedia) and hopefully, this article is a little bit better now than when I first started adding to it Rwaring58 (talk) 03:16, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

Merging "Emotional self-regulation" and "Regulation of emotion" pages
I stumbled across these two articles and feel they both ought to be merged.98.202.242.112 (talk) 03:00, 28 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Support I agree that they are two articles about basically the same thing. However, merging them will not be an easy job. Do you feel like doing it? I can assist you along the way. Start with putting merger proposal templates to the very top of each involved page, which is step II described in Merging. Then wait to see if any others support or oppose the merging of the articles. You can invite major contributors to articles to participate. Please let me know if you have any questions!  Lova Falk     talk   10:07, 1 March 2013 (UTC)
 * Support I don't mind taking this on, since I was about to give this page a good going over for the GOCE AnthonyW90 (talk) 09:47, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

Psychology EXP4005L at Florida International University recommendations
We recommend to make the following edits to the article. First we would like to change the title of the article to emotion regulation because this is what is seen in the majority of the literature. We are restructuring the first paragraph in a way that is more understandable and more objective. We are adding new citations and deleting some sentences that do not have any. Finally in this section and the others we are adding hyperlinks to related wiki articles. We propose to change the importance section to social interactions. In this new section we will delete the paragraphs that are biased and have no citations, and new paragraphs that with objective empirical support. Finally we recommend adding a new section on the neural basis of emotion regulation. We intend to include this research as part of the article and demonstrate that there is a physiological concept in addition to cognitive and social aspects.

DoktorGil (talk) 13:35, 11 March 2013 (UTC)DoktorGil
 * Hi DoktorGil and welcome!
 * Please don't change the name without making a proposal (and maybe inviting major contributors to this article to state their opinion). For instance, here you can see how this was done in another article.
 * Adding new citations is always a very good thing. However, please remember that Wikipedia is not an academic paper or essay. Wikipedia articles should not be based on WP:primary sources, but on reliable, published secondary sources (for instance, journal reviews and professional or advanced academic textbooks) and, to a lesser extent, on tertiary sources (such as undergraduate textbooks). WP:MEDRS describes how to identify reliable sources for medical information, which is a good guideline for many psychology articles as well.
 * I am looking forward to reading the new section on the neural basis of emotion regulation!
 * With friendly regards,  Lova Falk     talk   15:52, 11 March 2013 (UTC)

I have added a section on the neural basis of emotion regulation. This primarily is concerned with the various brain structures that have been found to be activated in fMRI simultaneously while emotion is regulated.

Lifevolt (talk) 22:59, 23 March 2013 (UTC)

Edited the first half of the introduction that was proposed earlier. Dhuston (talk) 15:42, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

Changed the importance section to social interactions to have a more neutral tone and secondary references as proposed earlier. Bredybryan (talk) 16:03, 27 March 2013 (UTC)


 * What do you guys think about the merging of the two articles, as suggested in the section above? AnthonyW90 (talk) 09:47, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

Title Change Proposal
As stated previously in Talk, "emotion regulation" is the term used most often in the literature. As very crude evidence, Google Scholar shows 502,000 results for the term "emotion regulation" and 134,000 results for "emotional self-regulation." Additionally, PsycInfo shows 4,859 results for "emotion regulation" and only 343 results for "emotional self-regulation." Consequently, I want to propose that the title be changed to "Emotion Regulation." Slyons123 (talk) 01:51, 29 June 2013 (UTC)


 * Yes, this is a good idea. The term "emotion regulation" is standard. Greg_Wadley (talk) 01:42, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

Organization and Improvements
With my spare time, I'm going to try to start reorganizing this article. To say the least, the layout is very confusing, some of the writing requires re-writing, and I'm not entirely certain that all of the information presented is relevant or useful. Not to mention, there has been an explosion of emotion regulation research in just the past decade, and very little of this research is presented here. If anyone has any suggestions about how to organize this article or about including certain topics, please share them!

Update: I've added a Theory and Strategies section. My next plan is to organize and add to the Development section. Other plans:
 * Add section(s) about mental health (putatively adaptive & maladaptive strategies/psychological flexibility/sleep) and psychopathology (emotion dysregulation in MDD, anxiety disorders, BD, etc.)
 * Add a section about emotion regulation in psychological treatment (e.g., emotion regulation therapy, CBT, DBT, mindfulness)
 * Add a section about methods used to study emotion regulation and current issues in this area
 * Add a section about interpersonal emotion regulation (linking to the current IER article or petitioning to combine the two)
 * Add a section about emotion regulation and culture
 * Expand the Neural Basis section

Deletion of more of the current information is probably warranted, or at least its reorganization is. This may include the following sections
 * Get rid of #Affect
 * Move #Affective chronometry to #Methods
 * Get rid of or move #Effects of low self-regulation and #In agitated states (also #Self-regulation of emotional distress) and replace with or integrate into #Psychopathology
 * Rewrite #Social Interactions as #Interpersonal (with lots of new information) and find a separate spot for #Decision making
 * The first definition of emotion regulation provided in the intro is very specific. The second definition provided is much broader and, to my knowledge, is used much more often in the literature than the first.  Therefore, the order of presentation should probably be reversed.  Moreover, the fact that emotion regulation can be effortful or automatic should be included in the second definition.  Beyond this, the intro may still require clean-up.

Please let me know if anyone objects to these changes. Slyons123 (talk) 22:03, 8 July 2013 (UTC)

For adding later to the article

Merger proposal
I propose that Regulation of emotion be merged into Emotional self-regulation. They seem to cover the same the same topic, but Emotional self-regulation appears to be a more mature article. Dr.enh (talk) 15:16, 10 November 2017 (UTC)
 * Support for this merge for reasons given.--Iztwoz (talk) 10:50, 18 November 2017 (UTC)
 * Support for a merge for the reasons given above. 159.83.54.2 (talk) 18:44, 3 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Support for merge, with change of title to Emotion regulation (the simplest and broadest title) . Biogeographist (talk) 15:55, 30 August 2018 (UTC)

✅ – No objections after nearly a year. I did not merge much of the content of Regulation of emotion, as some of it was redundant and some of it was not encyclopedic in style, in my view, although it did cite a few interesting studies that are not cited in the target article. Here is the last version of Regulation of emotion in case anyone else wants to review it for salvageable content that could be rewritten in a style more compatible with the merge target. I decided that a change of title to Emotion regulation (as I suggested above) is not appropriate, since the lead contrasts emotional self-regulation (directed at self) with interpersonal emotion regulation (directed at others) as two classes of emotion regulation. Nevertheless, it seems appropriate that Emotion regulation redirects here, since there is no justification for a separate article (indeed, that's what we're trying to avoid through this merge). Biogeographist (talk) 23:42, 4 October 2018 (UTC)

Digital emotion regulation
Hi Gregwadley, You have added a subsection on Digital emotion regulation. In my opinion it is written in a way as though people deliberately use devices with a conscientious aim to regulate their emotion in all cases. I would minimally rephrase text like that: "Recent research has shown that people are increasingly influenced by digital devices and services that may regulate their moods and emotions. A wide range of digital resources are involved in emotion regulation including smartphones, social media, streaming services, online shopping, and videogames..."

However you may disagree. Thanks. Tosha Langue (talk) 03:32, 21 November 2022 (UTC)


 * I would say that you are correct in saying that digital emotion regulation, like emotion regulation in general, is not always done consciously but is often implicit.
 * However, your proposed wording "people are increasingly influenced by digital devices and services that may regulate their moods and emotions" implies that it is the devices and services that are doing the regulating and that the people using the devices have no agency. However, a great deal of research has shown that people are often active agents in pursuing emotion regulation goals. Greg_Wadley (talk) 01:46, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

I feel that this article would benefit from more details. The author makes some assumptions of understandings of topics for the reader, however, if the reader knows nothing about psychology, they would probably be confused. I think you should go more into what kind of stimuli would cause a need for emotional self-regulation, positive or negative. Breadlover2350 (talk) 05:50, 26 September 2023 (UTC)Breadlover2350

Wiki Education assignment: Adult Development Fall 2023
— Assignment last updated by Breadlover2350 (talk) 00:45, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

Meditation
I would be curious to know whether or not meditation has an impact on one's ability to emotionally self regulate. It would also be interesting to see if there is a difference between different forms of meditation, such as transcendental vs. mindfulness meditation. Benfair03 (talk) 20:17, 23 January 2024 (UTC)


 * @Benfair03 The article does not mention meditation, and has no link to the respective article. Maybe someone will somehow correct this sometime. However there is content in a section Strategies -> Attention deployment, that is very similar to meditation, and (in my opinion) is interesting enough for a reader.
 * Tosha Langue (talk) 05:50, 24 January 2024 (UTC)