Cognitive control and emotion regulation: effort, efficacy, and choice
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Date
2024-08-20
Authors
Souliere, Stephanie
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Abstract
Regulating our emotions in an adaptive way is important for our well-being and social relationships and is thought to be related to cognitive control, which is our ability to act in a goal-directed manner. For instance, the dual mechanisms of control (DMC) framework is proposed as one way to categorize and understand emotion regulation. This research aimed at discerning differences in emotion regulation efficacy and choice through the two modes of cognitive control in the DMC framework. Two experiments were conducted to test the hypotheses that emotion regulation is more effective in proactive contexts compared to reactive contexts overall, and that individuals will choose to use certain emotion regulation strategies more when they are in a proactive context compared to reactive and others in reactive versus proactive. Understanding the temporal dynamics of emotion regulation will benefit the scientific community, in terms of elucidating the theoretical mechanisms underlying emotion regulation, and potentially help inform therapeutic interventions for individuals with emotion regulation difficulties. Experiment 1 demonstrated some evidence suggesting emotion regulation is more effective in proactive conditions but did not provide support for our interaction hypotheses regarding specific strategies in proactive versus reactive contexts. Experiment 2 did not replicate the effect of proactive emotion regulation being better than reactive emotion regulation, and further suggested that strategy choice was not influenced by proactive versus reactive contexts. I discuss the implications of my results, limitations of the current study, and provide suggestions for future research.
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Keywords
cognitive control, emotion regulation, dual-mechanisms, temporal dynamics