What Is Emotion Regulation?

In Search of a Phenomenon
Gerald L. Clore and Michael D. Robinson

Department of Psychology
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Psychologists have long been fascinated with the

phenomenon of emotion regulation. Freud’s assertions
about defense and anxiety, for example, represent an
early but influential approach. Today, there is again a
wave of interest in emotion regulation (e.g., Gross,
1999), and progress in this area is likely to be rapid.
Excellent examples of this new interest can be seen in
the three target articles in this issue. Each offers a set of
principles to guide future work, but the principles highlighted
in each are different. In our reading of the target
articles, we were struck with several questions that
were not answered. First, should we use the term emotion
regulation narrowly or more broadly? And second,
how can one separate the informational functions
of a feeling from attempts to regulate that feeling?

As we consider the first question, we are motivated

by two seemingly contradictory observations. On the
one hand, emotion regulation needs to be defined narrowly
enough that it emerges as a distinct phenomenon,
separable from related constructs like appraisal
and coping. On the other hand, emotion regulation
needs to be defined broadly enough that it adequately
captures the many ways in which people actually regulate
their moods and emotions in daily life. In considering
each of the target articles, we raise specific concerns
related to narrow versus broad definitions of
emotion regulation.

What Is the Relation Between Hedonic

and Instrumental Goals?

Both Erber and Erber (this issue) on the one hand

and Tice and Bratslavsky (this issue) on the other argue
forcefully for a particular view of mood regulation.
Each target article provides a principled view that aptly
captures part, but only part, of the range of regulatory
phenomena. Although the specific approaches are
quite different, both target articles concentrate on cases
in which feelings and instrumental goals are at odds.
In the Erber and Erber target article, it is argued that
people often choose to neutralize their mood states to
satisfy instrumental goals. As will be clear later, we
agree with the central premise of the target article: People
possess powerful epistemic and pragmatic motivations
that may be more important, or more fundamental
to action, than hedonic concerns (see also Swann,
1990). However, contrary to another idea in the Erber
and Erber target article, we think that affect typically
facilitates, or at least does not harm, one’s chances of
instrumental success.

Relevant to this last point, we wonder if the laboratory

paradigms employed by Erber and Erber have certain
features that may limit their generalizability. Consider
the manipulation involving a demanding anticipated
task. In most instances in life, feelings occur
in the context of pursuing other goals, so that such
dysjunctions between feelings at Time 1 and goal pursuit
at Time 2 may not be the norm. Consider the manipulation
involving an anticipated interaction with a
stranger. Again, interactions with strangers without
common goals or shared affiliations may not be the
norm, especially if we add that the interaction was being
evaluated by another stranger—the experimenter.
We wonder if Erber and Erber’s findings involving romantic
partners may be more typical of our daily interactions
with friends, family members, colleagues, and
even acquaintances.

Turning to the Tice and Bratslavsky target article,

we note that there is a similar assumption that mood
states often interfere with instrumental concerns. It is
undoubtedly true that many of us have nasty habits that
we are constantly fighting. These guilty pleasures
—gambling, drinking, over-eating, and so
on—may bring satisfaction in the short-term, but distress
in the long-term. During times of emotional
stress, our ability to regulate our behaviors sometimes
falters, and we find ourselves indulging in the very
things that we have been trying to avoid.

Tice and Bratslavsky highlight some of the traps involved

when we seek to avoid guilty pleasures. By way
of contrast, it is worth pointing out that approach-related
motivations are arguably normative (Coats,
Janoff-Bulman, & Alpert, 1996). In such situations,
when people seek desirable end-states, there may be no
inherent battle between pleasure and goal pursuit. The
outcomes that we desire, as well as their pursuit, bring
us pleasant feelings (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990; Sheldon,
Ryan, & Reis, 1996). These considerations remind us
that affective feelings often represent information
about the fate of motives and goals other than purely
hedonic ones, a topic to which we shall return later.

Can Reguation Be Differentiated From

Other Emotional Processes?

Larsen’s (this issue) conception of mood regulation

is quite a bit broader than Erber and Erber’s or Tice and
Bratslavsky’s. He proposes that mood regulation pervades
multiple stages of information processing, and
offers a model to specify the distinct regulatory mechanisms
at each stage (see Gross, 1999, for another stage
model of emotion regulation). One is impressed by the
variety of ways in which people can attempt to regulate
their mood states. Given the apparent ubiquity of
mood-regulatory processes, issues quickly arise as to
how to distinguish mood regulation from other emotional
processes. Larsen clearly appreciates such issues
and offers a number of distinctions that are relevant.

First, he suggests that, in mood regulation, the target

of regulatory efforts is mood itself rather than objective
events. This is believed to distinguish mood
regulation from coping, in that coping is arguably focused
on objective events rather than on mood states.
The distinction becomes less clear, however, if one
considers that Lazarus and colleagues included the
concept of emotion-focused coping within their
transactional framework (see Lazarus, 1993, for a review).
In emotion-focused coping, as in mood regulation,
the person engages in cognitive and behavioral
strategies to attempt to change his or her subjective
state. We note that Gross (1999) also attempts to distinguish
emotion regulation from emotion-focused
coping, but one can’t help feeling that regulation may
be simply a new name for emotion-focused coping.

Other questions arise when we examine the stages

themselves. Box 1 is an attention and encoding stage.
This stage consists of attending to and interpreting
emotional information in the environment, which is a
process that may be indistinguishable from emotional
appraisal (Lazarus, 1991). The present twist may be
the suggestion that motivational processes can influence
encoding operations, but we find ourselves wondering
whether the examples do show motivational
involvement. For example, the tendency of neurotics
to attend to negative environmental stimuli (Rusting &
Larsen, 1998) is difficult to interpret within a motivational
framework, given that these people, like those
who are more stable, desire positive mood states
(Rusting & Larsen, 1995).

In a similar vein, Box 2 is difficult to distinguish

from emotion-focused coping, and Box 3 relates to
personality processes that are not unambiguously regulatory
in nature. In this connection, the use of the term
temperament implies that mood reactivity in these examples
is based on neurobiological systems (e.g.,Gray, 1990)
rather than successful or unsuccessful regulation
attempts. In total, it is unclear whether the relevant
personality differences are motivational,
physiological, perceptual, or cognitive. Thus, it may be
important to define emotion regulation broadly, but
doing so makes it difficult to distinguish it from other
emotional processes.

Gross (1999), like us, also raised a number of ambiguities

that pertain to the emotion regulation literature.
Unless one assumes that all emotional phenomena are
regulatory, one faces the problem of how to distinguish
processes involved in emotion generation (e.g., appraisal)
from those involved in emotion regulation. In
addition, it may be difficult to distinguish motivated
regulatory processes from the consequences of mood
states. Relevant to this latter point, it is well known that
mood states have a wide variety of effects on behavior,
judgment, and processing (see Clore et al., in press, for
a recent review). It is likely to be counterproductive to
frame all of these effects as regulatory attempts rather
than, more simply, as consequences of being in a certain
mood state.

To summarize, Erber and Erber, as well as Tice and

Bratslavsky, offer empirically tractable theories of
mood regulation. However, their frameworks are probably
too narrow to serve as a general models of regulation.
Larsen, by contrast, does present a general model
of mood regulation. However, his model makes it clear
how difficult it is to differentiate mood regulation from
other emotional processes like attention, appraisal, and
reactivity.

Some Second Thoughts About Hedonism

Along with Erber and Erber, we question the centrality

of the hedonic principle as a basis for affect regulation.
We note that one function of affect is to
provide information that guides judgment and processing.
Thus, affect is not necessarily something to be regulated.
A recognition of the information value or
meaning of affective reactions provides an alternative
to the assumption that pleasure is the ultimate goal of
behavior. In addition, this view suggests that one reason
to regulate affect is to maintain its information
value.

We assume that the belief in mood regulation as a

powerful and common phenomenon reflects a belief
in the hedonic principle. The hedonic principle, when
taken literally, implies that the goal of all behavior is
affect regulation. The logic is straightforward. To the
extent (a) that all behavior is motivated by goals, (b)
that the status of the goals is indicated by affective
feedback, and (c) that such feedback leads to some
form of behavioral coping, then one can conclude that
behavior is a means of regulating affect. Indeed, this
is the essence of control theory (Powers, 1973) accounts
of affect such as Heise’s (1979). According to
such a view, behavior is governed by the experience
of pleasure and pain.

As an alternative, the affect-as-information approach

provides a slightly different understanding of
phenomena that look like examples of hedonism. In
this view, an important function of affect is to provide
information. Affect provides information about the
personal value of what is perceived. As feedback from
the appraisal system, it represents the appraisal of
something as good or bad in some way (Clore &
Ortony, 2000). However, in the ordinary course of
things, although behavior does follow affect, affect
may not be its goal. In the experience of the individual,
the goal is generally not pleasure, but what it signifies:
utility, goal-satisfaction, success, beauty, justice —in
short, the good.

It is true that behavioral systems do regulate affect,

that behavior can be turned on and off by affect,
and that modes of control that conflict with affect are
often ineffective. In this sense, affect is indeed the
currency of behavioral systems. However, just as
economists should not conclude that the function of
human behavior is to make money, psychologists
also should not assume that the function of behavior
is to make pleasure. Money, like positive affect, is a
representation of something else—value. And it is a
fallacy held jointly by materialism and hedonism
that the function of behavior is to maximize representations
of value rather than to maximize value itself.
Thus, people strive to attain the good and to
avoid the bad, whether that goodness is a moral good
or simply attaining the next step in a thoroughly
mundane goal sequence.

Some investigators (e.g., Hoebel, Rada, Maru, &

Pothos, 1999) proposed that dopamine is the common
currency in the brain. Many drugs, food, sex, and
other reinforcers are assumed to act by producing dopamine.
Rats have been shown to work hard for brain
stimulation that produces dopamine—that is, to work
hard for something with no other biological value
than a momentary positive experience. These rats,
like drug addicts, are indeed being governed by the
pleasure principle. So too was a polar bear that used to
inhabit the San Diego Zoo, who spent his days licking
his genitals. Deprived of any more ecologically
meaningful way of producing reward, he found the
most reliable source of dopamine that his limited environment
afforded. But we suspect that if the polar
bear had been given a life satisfaction questionnaire,
he would not have scored highly. Despite the pleasure
he gave himself, he would not have said that he was a
happy polar bear, because he apparently found little
or nothing in his environment of value. As in the case
of the drug addict, when a person goes directly for the
experience of pleasure, rather than pursuing the good
represented by affect, other things may gradually lose
their value. Problem gamblers, thrill seekers, and
drug addicts, after experiencing maximal dosages of
dopamine, may find ordinary sources of reward not
very rewarding.

One could argue, then, that the most important form

of emotion regulation is not related to maximizing
pleasure and minimizing pain in the short run, but
rather to investing one’s efforts (and hence one’s affect)
in endeavors and relationships that continue to
pay affective dividends. This form of affect regulation
is focused on conserving the valuing capacity of the
appraisal system, in order to keep the currency of affect
from becoming inflated.

Conclusion

We typically consider emotions as signals of success

or failure on important tasks (e.g., Wyer, Clore, &
Isbell, 1999). As such, emotions may be important for
the significance they convey rather than for their
hedonic quality as such. Hence, we believe that a critical
question for the field concerns how central attempts
to manage one’s feelings really are to the study of emotion.
For our part, we suspect that the field is in danger
of treating a supporting actor as the central character.

Note
Gerald L. Clore, Department of Psychology, University
of Illinois, 603 E. Daniel Street, Champaign,
IL 61820–6267. E-mail: gclore@s.pshych.uiuc.edu

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