IMPLICIT EMOTION REGULATION 1
Implicit Emotion Regulation:
Feeling Better Without Knowing Why
Sander L. Koole
VU University Amsterdam
Thomas L. Webb
University of Sheffield
Paschal L. Sheeran
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
December 17, 2014
Main text: 2,603 words
Author Note
The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of a Consolidator Grant from the European
Research Council (ERC-2011-StG_20101124) to Sander L. Koole. Correspondence
regarding this article should be addressed to Sander L. Koole, VU University Amsterdam,
Department of Clinical Psychology, Van der Boechorststraat 1, 1081 BT Amsterdam, the
Netherlands. Email: [email protected].
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Abstract
Emotion regulation is not always deliberate, but can also operate on nonconscious or implicit
levels. From an action control perspective, there are three ways in which implicit processes
may support emotion regulation. First, implicit processes may allow people to decide whether
or not to engage in emotion regulation, through implicit activation of emotion regulation
goals and implicit monitoring of whether emotional responses are compatible with these
goals. Second, implicit processes may guide people in selecting suitable emotion regulation
strategies, by activating habitual strategies and by tailoring strategies to situational
affordances. Third, the implicit processes recruited by habits and implementation intentions
may facilitate the enactment of emotion regulation strategies. Implicit processes are thus vital
in the self-regulation of emotion.
Abstract word count: 118 words
IMPLICIT EMOTION REGULATION 3
Implicit Emotion Regulation:
Feeling Better Without Knowing Why
Emotions don’t just happen to people. Indeed, volumes of research have shown that
people actively regulate the kinds of emotions they have, the intensity of their emotions, and
how they experience and express their emotions (for reviews, see Gross, 2014; Koole, 2009;
Webb, Miles, & Sheeran, 2012). Successful emotion regulation allows people to achieve a
wide range of beneficial outcomes, including better mental health (Aldao, Nolen-Hoeksema,
& Schweizer, 2010), physical health (Chen & Miller, 2014), interpersonal relationships
(Häfner & IJzerman, 2011), and work performance (Jiang, Zhang, & Tjosvold, 2013). It is
therefore important to understand how people regulate their emotions and the factors that
influence their success in so doing.
Emotion regulation is traditionally portrayed as an activity that is wholly conscious
and deliberate (termed ‘explicit’ emotion regulation, Gross, 2014). However, there is growing
evidence that emotion regulation also operates on more automatic or implicit levels (for
reviews, see Gyurak, Gross, & Etkin, 2011; Koole & Rothermund, 2011). At first glance, the
notion of implicit emotion regulation may seem reminiscent of the unconscious defenses of
Freudian theory (Freud, 1937; for modern discussions, see Paulhus, Fridhandler, & Hayes,
1997; Rice & Hofman, 2014). However, Freud saw unconscious defenses as primitive and
pathological forces within the human psyche. By contrast, implicit emotion regulation
involves relatively sophisticated, intelligent cognitive processes that are – for the most part –
conducive to psychological health and wellbeing (e.g., Hopp, Troy, & Mauss, 2011; Koole &
Jostmann, 2004; Schwager & Rothermund, 2013).
Although implicit emotion regulation is theoretically and empirically distinct from
explicit emotion regulation, both serve the same overarching purpose – to help people to selfregulate their emotions in a flexible and context-sensitive manner (Aldao, 2013). According
IMPLICIT EMOTION REGULATION 4
to the action control theory of emotion regulation by Webb and colleagues, the general task
of regulating emotions may be divided into three interrelated subtasks (Webb, SchweigerGallo, Miles, Gollwitzer, & Sheeran, 2012). First, people have to determine if they need to
regulate their emotions. Second, if the answer is affirmative, people have to decide which
strategies they would like to use. Third, people have to enact these strategies in specific
situations. In the remainder of this article, we consider in more detail how implicit emotion
regulation may facilitate each of these three self-regulatory tasks.
To Regulate or Not to Regulate
People’s spontaneous emotions are adaptive in many everyday situations (Damasio,
1994; Frijda, 1986; Panksepp, 1998). Thus, before people start interfering with their
emotions, they need to make sure that it is sensible for them to engage in emotion regulation.
To this end, people require standards that identify the appropriate or desired emotional
response, such as the goal to appear self-confident or the social norm to get along with others.
Although people may consciously adopt emotion regulation goals (Tamir, 2009), such goals
may also be implicitly activated. For instance, Tamir, Ford, and Ryan (2013) found that
surreptitiously exposing participants to words related to a collaboration goal (versus neutral
words) led participants to indicate that they wanted to feel less angry during a subsequent,
unrelated task. Importantly, participants were unaware of a theme to the words that they had
seen, suggesting that the effect occurred at an implicit or nonconscious level. Other
experiments have similarly shown that implicitly priming emotion regulation goals can
trigger emotion regulation processes (Williams, Bargh, Nocera, & Gray, 2009).
Once people have adopted an emotion regulation goal, people have to monitor
whether their ongoing emotional responses diverge from the goal state. This monitoring
process may occur, at least in part, on implicit levels. An extensive literature within cognitive
IMPLICIT EMOTION REGULATION 5
psychology supports a process that monitors the relation between desired and actual
responses (Botvinick, Cohen, & Carter, 2004). This cognitive monitoring process appears to
be supported by the anterior cingulate cortex as well as frontal and parietal regions
(Botvinick et al., 2004; Benn, Webb, Chang, Sun, Wilkinson, & Farrow, 2014). Etkin and
associates examined if an analogous monitoring process may operate for inappropriate
emotional responses. Using a emotional variant of the classic Stroop task (MacLeod, 1991),
these researchers found that conflicts between task-relevant and task-irrelevant emotional
responses lead to a slow-down in response times that is associated with activation of the right
amygdala (Etkin, Egner, & Kalisch, 2011). These findings suggest that a specialized neural
network may implicitly monitor if people display inappropriate emotional responses.
In sum, implicit processes may assist decisions about whether or not to engage in
emotion regulation. This assistance can take one of two forms. First, implicit processes may
activate goals or other standards regarding appropriate or desired emotional responses (Tamir
et al., 2013). Second, implicit processes help people to monitor whether their emotional
responses diverge from those standards. Thus, paradoxically, implicit processes may
influence the effectiveness of emotion regulation even before people have begun to regulate
their emotions.
Strategy Selection
Once people have decided that emotion regulation is warranted, they need to figure
out which strategy is most likely to bring desired emotional outcomes. This is not an easy
task, given that people may choose from many different kinds of emotion regulation
strategies (e.g., avoidance, distraction, rumination, reappraisal, suppression, acceptance). To
further complicate matters, the adaptiveness of emotion regulation strategies is not fixed, but
varies depending on circumstances (Aldao, 2013; Sheppes & Levin, 2013).
IMPLICIT EMOTION REGULATION 6
So how do people choose strategies that are optimally matched to the specifics of the
situation? One possibility is that people carefully analyze the pros and cons of each of the
emotion regulation strategies that are potentially available to them, and then select those
strategies with the highest expected utility (Sheppes & Levin, 2013). Such deliberations may
be especially influential when people have ample motivation, time, and cognitive resources
on their hands to consider how they will go about regulating their emotions. For instance,
people may ponder at length about the optimal strategy for regulating their emotions before
an important job interview or when undergoing psychotherapy. In many everyday settings,
however, people have to deal with competing priorities that make it difficult, if not
impossible, for people to extensively deliberate about how they will manage their emotions.
Particularly in the latter cases, it becomes more likely that people will rely on implicit
processes in selecting emotion regulation strategies.
Some emotion regulation strategies may be used frequently and consistently in certain
situations and, as a result, become habitual. Such habitual strategies may be elicited
automatically when dealing with undesired emotions (Christou-Champi, Farrow, & Webb,
2014). The formation of emotion regulation habits may thus render the stage of strategy
selection implicit, such that people can move directly to enacting the emotion regulation
strategy (as we discuss in the next section) without first deliberating on which strategy is
optinal. For instance, an anxious student may learn to lower her expectations each time that
she takes an exam, to brace herself for possible failure (Norem, 2008).
Habits tend to form as a function of consistent responses to environments that are
relatively structured and predictable (Wood & Neal, 2007). In environments that are more
dynamic and unpredictable, however, people may need to adjust the selection of emotion
regulation strategies to the specifics of the situation. A large body of research on situated
(social) cognition suggests that such adjustments to situational demands are facilitated by
IMPLICIT EMOTION REGULATION 7
implicit processes (Barsalou, 2007; Smith & Semin, 2004, 2007), and the situated cognition
perspective has been extended to understand the selection of emotion regulation strategies
(Koole & Veenstra, in press). The basic idea is that people work with the affordances of the
environment to develop optimal strategies for emotion regulation.
Consistent with these ideas, Veenstra, Schneider, Domachowska, Bushman, and
Koole (2014) found that people with high (rather than low) trait anger are prone to respond to
provocations with increased approach motivation, which boosts their levels of anger and
aggression. From a situated cognition perspective, however, some settings do not easily lend
themselves to approach behavior, and may hence interfere with the usual emotion regulation
strategy of people with high trait anger. To test this idea, Veenstra et al. manipulated body
postures (leaning backward), hand movements (pushing), and ambient darkness, all of which
interfere with approach behavior, and examined how these manipulations influenced anger
and aggression among people varying in trait anger. The results showed that high trait anger
predicted greater anger and aggression when the situation afforded approach tendencies, but
that this effect disappeared when the situation made approach difficult. These findings
demonstrate how situational contingencies can implicitly influence the selection of emotion
regulation strategies.
Taken together, the evidence suggests that implicit processes play a key role in the
selection of emotion regulation strategies. In the case of habitual emotion regulation, implicit
processes may allow people to advance directly from activating an emotion-regulatory goal
towards enacting a well-rehearsed emotion regulation strategy. When environments are more
dynamic and unpredictable, however, implicit processes may support more contextualized
ways of selecting emotion regulation strategies, which operate in close interaction with
situational affordances.
IMPLICIT EMOTION REGULATION 8
Enacting the Strategy
Identifying a particular emotion regulation strategy does not guarantee that people
will actually use this strategy. Indeed, research on action control has shown that there is a
substantial gap between intentions and action – people often struggle to implement their
intended courses of action (for reviews, see Webb & Sheeran, 2006; Webb, Schweiger Gallo,
et al., 2012). The first challenge in implementing an emotion regulation strategy is
identifying a suitable opportunity for using that strategy. This critical task may be supported
by implicit attentional processes. For instance, Vogt, Lozo, Koster, and De Houwer (2011)
proposed that emotion regulation goals bias attention towards stimuli that may help towards
fulfilling these goals. In line with this, Vogt and associates showed that a disgust induction
led participants to display an early attentional bias towards cleanliness stimuli (e.g., soap,
taking a bath). This attentional mechanism presumably helps to propel people toward
activities that down-regulate feelings of disgust. Similar attentional biases may operate to
promote global stability and flexibility in emotional functioning (Koole, Schwager, &
Rothermund, in press).
After a suitable opportunity has presented itself, a second challenge in implementing
an emotion regulation strategy lies in executing the strategy effectively. The execution of
emotion regulation strategies depends on procedural skills that are at least partly implicit.
People’s emotion-regulatory skills are presumably grounded in early interaction experiences
with caregivers (Moutsiana, Fearon, Murray, Cooper, ea 2014). Nevertheless, the ability to
regulate emotions continues to improve throughout the lifespan (Charles & Carstensen, 2014)
and an experiment by Christou-Champi et al. (2014) showed that short practice sessions over
three days can improve emotion regulation two weeks later. Thus, training may be an
important way to improve the implementation of emotion regulation strategies.
IMPLICIT EMOTION REGULATION 9
One way that people can increase the likelihood of enacting their chosen strategy for
emotion regulation is by forming implementation intentions (Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 2006).
Implementation intentions have the format ‘‘If situation x is encountered, then I will initiate
response y!’ Implementation intentions thus link an opportunity (specified in the if-part of the
plan) with a suitable goal-directed response (in the then-part of the plan). Evidence suggests
that forming implementation intentions allows people to execute intended actions in a fast
and efficient manner that does not require conscious intention (see Gollwitzer & Sheeran,
2006, for a review and meta-analysis). Thus, forming implementation intentions enables
people to strategically capitalize on the benefits of implicit processes for enacting emotion
regulation strategies. In support of this idea, a recent meta-analysis of 30 studies confirmed
that forming implementation intentions is considerably more effective than merely forming
goal intentions in promoting effective emotion regulation (Webb, Schweiger Gallo, et al.,
2012).
In sum, implicit processes may also contribute to the effective enactment of emotion
regulation strategies. Specifically, the activation of regulation goals may direct attention
toward suitable opportunities for enacting these goals and, through repeated practice and
experience, people may acquire useful habits and skills that further facilitate emotion
regulation. In addition, by forming implementation intentions, people may capitalize on
implicit processes that help them to enact emotion regulation strategies in designated
situations.
Conclusions and Outlook
The present article reviewed three ways in which implicit processes can influence
emotion regulation. First, we saw how the implicit activation of emotion regulation goals and
implicit monitoring of emotional responses may help people to determine if they need to
IMPLICIT EMOTION REGULATION 10
engage in emotion regulation. Second, we considered how the use of habitual emotion
regulation strategies may simplify the selection of emotion regulation strategies, while
situational affordances may lead people to select emotion regulation strategies ‘on the fly’,
without the need for premeditation. Third, we discussed how well-rehearsed emotion
regulation and the formation of implementation intentions may invoke implicit processes that
facilitate the enactment of emotion regulation strategies. Taken together, the review reveals
that implicit processes allow people to manage their emotions in a flexible and contextsensitive manner.
The three ways in which implicit processes influence emotion regulation were derived
from an action control perspective on emotion regulation (Webb, Schweiger Gallo, et al.,
2012) that decomposed the task of regulating emotions into smaller subtasks. This conception
moves us beyond an all-or-none conception of implicit emotion regulation. Indeed, our
analysis suggests that there are multiple ways in which implicit processes may feed into
people’s emotion-regulatory dynamics. Consequently, it does not seem meaningful to
characterize emotion regulation as either implicit or explicit. Instead, we should ask when, in
what ways, and to what extent is emotion regulation implicit or explicit. For instance, an
implicitly primed emotion regulation goal may lead a person to consciously deliberate if she
should distract herself from the emotional stimulus or engage in reappraisal. In cases such as
these, emotion regulation involves a dynamic interplay between implicit and explicit
processes.
Throughout the present article, our focus has been on how implicit processes may
benefit emotion regulation. This focus is consistent with findings linking efficiency at
implicit emotion regulation to improved mental health (DeWall et al., 2011) and flexibility in
self-regulation (Koole & Fockenberg, 2011). This is not to say, however, that all implicit
forms of implicit emotion regulation are always or inherently beneficial. Indeed, the three
IMPLICIT EMOTION REGULATION 11
emotion-regulatory tasks that we distinguish in our action control perspective may also serve
as a framework for pinpointing where implicit emotion regulation might go wrong. First,
maladaptive implicit influences on the decision to regulate emotions may lead people to
engage in either too little or too much emotion regulation. Second, implicit processes could
be antithetical to the selection of effective emotion regulation strategies, and cause people to
select habitual but ineffective strategies such as venting or to rely too much on normative
strategies. Third, maladaptive implicit influence during the enactment of emotion regulation
strategies could cause people to implement strategies too early, too late, or for too little time.
Linking implicit emotion regulation to emotion regulation difficulties could have
particular relevance for clinical psychology. Over the last decade, insights from emotion
regulation have increasingly found their way to the clinical domain (e.g., Aldao & NolenHoeksema, 2012; Gross & Jazaieri, 2014; Tull, Rodman, & Roemer, 2008). Most of this
work, however, has focused on healthy populations (for a notable exception, see Etkin,
Prater, Hoeft, Menon, & Schatzberg, 2010). Nevertheless, it seems theoretically plausible that
at least some forms of psychopathology arise from deficits in implicit emotion regulation.
Exploring maladaptive forms of implicit emotion regulation may thus shed important new
light on the manifold contributions of implicit emotion regulation to health and wellbeing.
IMPLICIT EMOTION REGULATION 12
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