Healthy and Unhealthy Emotion Regulation: Personality Processes, Individual Differences, and Life Span Development
2004/10/28 by Oliver P. John, James J. Gross · 2,362 citations
Neuroscience · Psychology · #Affect (linguistics) #Child and Adolescent Psychosocial and Emotional Development #Cognition #Cognitive Abilities and Testing #Cognitive appraisal #Cognitive psychology #Cognitive reappraisal #Developmental psychology #Expressive Suppression #Life span #Mental Health Research Topics #Neuroscience #Normative #Personality #Psychology #Social psychology
paper · doi:10.1111/j.1467-6494.2004.00298.x
published in Journal of Personality 72(6), 1301-1334 (Wiley)
openalex publication_date 2004/10/28 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Abstract
Individuals regulate their emotions in a wide variety of ways. Are some forms of emotion regulation healthier than others? We focus on two commonly used emotion regulation strategies: reappraisal (changing the way one thinks about a potentially emotion-eliciting event) and suppression (changing the way one responds behaviorally to an emotion-eliciting event). In the first section, we review experimental findings showing that reappraisal has a healthier profile of short-term affective, cognitive, and social consequences than suppression. In the second section, we review individual-difference findings, which show that using reappraisal to regulate emotions is associated with healthier patterns of affect, social functioning, and well-being than is using suppression. In the third section, we consider issues in the development of reappraisal and suppression and provide new evidence for a normative shift toward an increasingly healthy emotion regulation profile during adulthood (i.e., increases in the use of reappraisal and decreases in the use of suppression).
Citations
Cited by
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