Emotions
Emotions are powerful. Sometimes I cry when I watch fictionalized TV shows. I remember watching Breaking Bad and being utterly devastated at least three times. Like, I would be getting a shower days or weeks later, and just say “Oh, man.” And those characters weren’t even real …
Definition of Emotion
So psychology is a lot like philosophy, defining your terms is super important. Emotion researchers have defined emotion in a variety of ways, but generally speaking, this article does a pretty good job of summarizing (emphasis added is my own):
Current models posit that emotions are valenced responses to external stimuli and/or internal mental representations that (i) involve changes across multiple response systems (e.g. experiential, behavioral, peripheral physiological [10]), (ii) are distinct from moods, in that they often have identifiable objects or triggers, (iii) can be either unlearned responses to stimuli with intrinsic affective properties (e.g. an unconditioned response to an aversive shock) or learned responses to stimuli with acquired emotional value (e.g. a conditioned response or stimulus–reward association), (iv) and can involve multiple types of appraisal processes that assess the significance of stimuli to current goals [11], that (v) depend upon different neural systems [3,12,13].
The parts I bolded above are particularly important for newcomers to emotion: psychological states like depression, though important, are not emotions; emotions can be rational (conscious) or automatic (subconscious), and they are typically both. For example, let’s say you see an ex on a date with someone else. Your automatic emotional response is jealousy, and your conscious reaction (thoughts come after automatic feelings) is to think “well, I shouldn’t care — I broke up with him, after all!”.
Regulating Emotions
There’s a school of thought that traces its history to at least the Roman Stoics that states something like this: society is built upon the repression of desire (or emotion). Humans can be nasty creatures with nasty impulses, and these need to be overridden by rational values.
Another school of thought is epitomized by Sigmund Freund, who advocated ‘releasing’ repressed emotion: “Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.”
Regardless of your philosophical bent toward the expression of emotion, there are certainly times when we want to regulat how we express our emotions. For example, expressing anger as physical assault certainly has repercussions. Expression fear as procrastination does as well.
Self-regulation, also referred to as affect regulation and emotional self-regulation, is the ability to modulate your own emotions and behavior, and it’s often discussed vis-à-vis goal pursuit.