How do people choose how to regulate their own and other people's emotions?

Emotion regulation refers to the things that people do to influence their own or other people’s emotions. Emotion regulation is thought to be a multi-stage process that involves: (i) identifying the need to regulate emotions, (ii) choosing whether and how to do this from the strategies available, (iii) implementing the chosen strategy, and finally (iv) monitoring the outcomes of regulation. Most research on emotion regulation focuses on the implementation stage; however, research increasingly considers what strategies people choose to regulate their emotions - broadly termed ‘emotion regulation choice’. The research presented in this thesis investigates a number of important, but yet, unanswered questions about how people choose to regulate their own and other people’s emotions.

Chapter 2 presents a systematic review that identifies and organises the factors that might influence whether and how people choose to regulate their own emotions. Meta-analysis is then used to estimate the impact that each factor has on intentions to regulate and emotion regulation choice. The thesis then considers interpersonal emotion regulation. More specifically, Chapter 4 examines whether people choose to regulate other people’s emotions (i.e., interpersonal emotion regulation choice) in a similar way to how they choose to regulate their own emotions (i.e., intrapersonal emotion regulation choice). Chapter 5 then presents a series of studies that examine potential explanations for the difference identified between intrapersonal and interpersonal emotion regulation choice. Together, the research both contributes to and furthers current understanding of how people choose to regulate their own and other people’s emotions, and as discussed in Chapter 6, provides a basis for future research to further investigate intrapersonal and interpersonal emotion regulation choice.