Emotion Generation and Emotion Regulation: One or Two Depends on Your Point of View

By James J. Gross, Lisa Feldman Barrett. Emotion Review, 2011

806 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Emotion regulation has the odd distinction of being a wildly popular construct whose scientific existence is in considerable doubt. In this article, we discuss the confusion about whether emotion generation and emotion regulation can and should be distinguished from one another. We describe a continuum of perspectives on emotion, and highlight how different (often mutually incompatible) perspectives on emotion lead to different views about whether emotion generation and emotion regulation can be usefully distinguished. We argue that making differences in perspective explicit serves the function of allowing researchers with different theoretical commitments to collaborate productively despite seemingly insurmountable differences in terminology and methods.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8808a0c808181d8ce9b17ed6e8618aed8c06d8bf

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Citations in the corpus

The brain basis of emotion: A meta-analytic review (2012, positive): “University of Geneva, on 20 Oct 2017 at 14:48:49, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. to psychological construction accounts (e.g., Clore & Ortony 2000; 2008) (cf. Gross & Barrett 2011).”
EMOTION DYSREGULATION MODEL OF MOOD AND ANXIETY DISORDERS (2012, background): “Furthermore, depending on the presumed core assumptions about emotions and the contribution of biological, cognitive, and social factors, emotion regulation needs to be distinguished from emotion generation (for more discussion see, [46]).”
Emotion regulation and psychopathology: the role of gender. (2012, background): “For the bulk of this review, I discuss emotion regulation strategies as distinct from the experience of emotion, but I eventually return to a discussion of the interrelatedness of the experience and regulation of emotion (see also the review by Gross & Barrett 2011).”
Dealing with feeling: a meta-analysis of the effectiveness of strategies derived from the process model of emotion regulation. (2012, background): “One possibility is that emotion regulation is so common that in many instances it represents the “default” strategy (cf. the debate over whether emotion generation can be separated from emotion regulation; Gross & Feldman Barrett, 2011; Kappas, 2011; Thompson, 2011).”
Emotion, Emotion Regulation, and Psychopathology (2014, background): “One reason for this is the heterogeneity of emotion-related processes, as well as the considerable divergence in definitions of emotion and emotion regulation (Gross & Barrett, 2011).”
Empathy: a motivated account. (2014, background): “Instead, regulatory strategies can alter the entire process of emotion experience, sometimes preempting emotion generation altogether (Gross & Barrett, 2011).”
Emotion Regulation: Current Status and Future Prospects (2015, background): “This is because there are many different ways to conceptualize emotion (Gross & Barrett, 2011).”
Psychological Construction: The Darwinian Approach to the Science of Emotion (2013, background): “…are created when afferent information from the body or its central nervous system representation (i.e., the internal, physical state or its mental counterpart, affect) is made meaningful in relation to the external surroundings (for a discussion of different approaches, see Gross & Barrett, 2011).”
Functional imaging studies of emotion regulation: A synthetic review and evolving model of the cognitive control of emotion (2012, neutral): “…sake of simplicity, we present the psychological and neural systems involved in the generation and regulation of emotion as being distinct yet it should be noted that there is evidence to suggest that the underlying psychological 14 and neural mechanisms 15, 16 are at least partially overlapping.”