Why Beliefs About Emotion Matter: An Emotion-Regulation Perspective

By B. Ford, James J. Gross. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2018

300 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The world is complicated, and we hold a large number of beliefs about how it works. These beliefs are important because they shape how we interact with the world. One particularly impactful set of beliefs centers on emotion, and a small but growing literature has begun to document the links between emotion beliefs and a wide range of emotional, interpersonal, and clinical outcomes. Here, we review the literature that has begun to examine beliefs about emotion, focusing on two fundamental beliefs, namely whether emotions are good or bad and whether emotions are controllable or uncontrollable. We then consider one underlying mechanism that we think may link these emotion beliefs with downstream outcomes, namely emotion regulation. Finally, we highlight the role of beliefs about emotion across various psychological disciplines and outline several promising directions for future research.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7db8d010b5b8293a6080dbc50cd478f81cea0fb9

Citations in the corpus

• Transcending the “good & bad” and “here & now” in emotion regulation: Costs and benefits of strategies across regulatory stages (2020, unknown): “…Coffey, Berenbaum, & Kerns, 2003), emotional differentiation (e.g., Barrett, Gross, Christensen, & Benvenuto, 2001), emotional clarity (e.g., Gratz & Roemer, 2004), beliefs about emotion regulation (e.g., Ford & Gross, 2019), and attitudes towards emotion (e.g., Markovitch, Netzer, & Tamir, 2017).”