Child Development, March/April 2004, Volume 75, Number 2, Pages 377 – 394
On the Nature of Emotion Regulation
Joseph J. Campos, Carl B. Frankel, and Linda Camras
This paper presents a unitary approach to emotion and emotion regulation, building on the excellent points in
the lead article by Cole, Martin, and Dennis (this issue), as well as the fine commentaries that follow it. It begins
by stressing how, in the real world, the processes underlying emotion and emotion regulation appear to be
largely one and the same, rendering the value of the distinction largely for the benefit of analysis. There is an
extensive discussion of how the same processes can generate emotions (i.e., are constitutive of emotion) and
account for variability of manifestation of emotion in context (i.e., regulate them). Following an extensive review
of many of the principles involved in emotion and emotion regulation, the paper presents implications for
developmental study of infants and children, includes several methodological recommendations, and concludes
with an analysis of the extent to which contemporary affective neuroscience contributes to the study of emotion
and emotion regulation.
Albert Einstein supposedly stated that a scientific
explanation should be simple, but not too simple. In
this commentary, we strive to meet Einstein’s
maxim. We attempt to glean many of the insights
about emotion regulation contained in the provocative lead article by Cole, Martin, and Dennis (this
issue), as well as in the various commentaries it
spawned. Those commentaries sometimes endorse,
frequently modify, and sometimes reject ideas presented in the lead article. However, both the lead
article and the commentaries address limited aspects
of emotion regulation. Our task is thus one of supplementing and briefly systematizing what we believe it takes to explain emotion regulation and its
relation to the concept of emotion. Based on the
principles we provide, we intend to take up the
challenge posed by Bridges, Denham, and Ganiban
(this issue) and point to new and fruitful directions
for studies in emotion regulation relevant to basic
researchers, clinicians, and applied developmentalists alike.
Joseph J. Campos, Department of Psychology, University of
California, Berkeley; Carl B. Frankel, Department of Psychology,
Stanford University; Linda Camras, Department of Psychology, De
Paul University.
The preparation of this article was greatly facilitated by several
research grants, including Grant HD-39925 from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to the first author, Grant BCS 0002001 from the National Science Foundation to
the first author, Grant MH-47543 from the National Institute of
Mental Health to both the first and third authors, and Grant MH59315 from the National Institute of Mental Health to the third
author.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to
Joseph J. Campos, Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-1650. Electronic mail may be sent to
[email protected].
Two-Factor Approaches to Emotion Regulation
The concept of emotion regulation at first seems
simple enough. The term implies the existence of two
phenomenaFone involving a set of processes related to the generation of emotion, and the second a
different set of processes coming after the elicited
emotion and involving management or mismanagement of the generated emotion. Indeed, the endorsement of such a two-factor model is a major
theme at the conclusion of the lead article by Cole
et al. (this issue), in which they recommend research
approaches that first generate emotion, then study
how regulatory process change the elicited emotional state.
Such a two-factor approach to emotion regulation
is both simple and commonsensical. How often has
each of us experienced the two factors in ourselves?
First, we feel overwhelmed, such as after an intense
frustration (creating the ‘‘urge to attack someone’’),
then we ‘‘count to 10,’’ ‘‘take a deep breath,’’ or ‘‘curb
our wrath,’’ hoping to modulate or prevent altogether the manifestation of behaviors we deem undesirable. This two-step experience is so compelling
it has become the canonical phenomenon of emotion
regulationFthat which most researchers want to
explain.
A corollary of the two-factor approach to emotion
regulation also seems simple, straightforward, and
intuitively appealing. That corollary is the belief that
there are ‘‘good’’ emotions, such as joy, relief, and
enjoyment, and ‘‘bad’’ emotions, such as anger,
shame, and scorn. The explanatory task for those
researching emotion regulation is then to derive
r 2004 by the Society for Research in Child Development, Inc.
All rights reserved. 0009-3920/2004/7502-0010
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Campos, Frankel, and Camras
principles and procedures to help the individual
maximize the good emotions and minimize the bad
emotions. Many, if not most, researchers on emotion
regulation take as their starting point the identification and the eradication of phenomena such as infant
crying, temper tantrums, school-age fighting, taunting, harassment, social withdrawal, and inappropriate expressions of emotions, and substitute
socially more acceptable emotional behaviors. In this
sense, there are many points of convergence between
researchers studying emotion regulation and those
emphasizing the merits of ‘‘positive psychology’’
(see Lazarus, 2003,and subsequent commentaries
on his treatment of positive psychology).
The two-factor principle and its corollary thus are
face valid. But are they appropriate for an understanding of what emotion regulation is? In this paper, we say, ‘‘No,’’ and argue that, as in Einstein’s
maxim, the canonical approach is too simple. In the
first place, we argue that there is no ‘‘pure’’ emotion,
if by that is meant an emotion that ever exists in
an unregulated manner. If so, there is no first factor
to account for in a two-factor theory. Furthermore,
even if there were such a phenomenon as a pure
emotion, we would have no way of knowing it.
A pure emotion would have clear indication of
its existenceFindications that could serve as its
operational definition. Unfortunately, emotion is not
readily amenable to operational definition. More
specifically, no one has ever convincingly presented
coherent facial, vocal, gestural, physiological, or
cerebral indexes that approximate a 1:1 relation to an
emotional state (Davidson, Jackson, & Kalin, 2000).
We have no gold standard, no ostensive definition of
emotion. Instead, we have a state of affairs in which
(a) many behaviors can be in the service of a single
emotion, and (b) the same behavior can be in the
service of multiple emotions. This observation suggests that extraordinary caution is in order about the
many difficulties of reliably identifying the emotion
that subsequent processes then, ex hypothesis, modify or regulate.
To illustrate the first part of this observation,
consider how two morphologically divergent reactions can reflect the same emotion, shame. Shame is
the emotion of avoiding social interaction with a
person who disapproves of one’s actions.1 In one
1
A clarification is in order here. We believe that shame, like all
other emotional states, is not merely a feeling state that precedes
behavior, nor is it the behavior itself. Rather, shame is the evaluation by individuals of the condition they find themselves in and
their attempts to deal with that condition. (In the case of shame,
the condition is one of finding oneself being observed in a disapproving manner by another and attempting to discontinue that
manifestation of shame, the person avoids social
intercourse by hiding his or her face, or moving into
the social background; in another case, the person
avoids the social intercourse by distracting the disapproving person through rapid banter and change
of venue. Notice that though morphologically different, the divergent responses are in the service of
the same endFhiding the self from the disapproved
act and the self’s role in that act.
To illustrate the second part of the observation,
consider how response inhibition can reflect two
very different emotions. Inhibition can reflect the
emotion of shame when it results in behavioral arrest
that cuts off social interaction following disapproval,
while morphologically similar inhibition can reflect
fearFthe emotion linked to threat to the integrity or
safety of the selfFby avoiding a danger, such as in
fear of a predator.
There is a second difficulty in identifying emotion:
We cannot use an environmental event (an ‘‘incentive event,’’ as Kagan, 1978, called it) as a proxy
for an expected emotional outcome. For instance,
arm restraint is frequently mentioned in this set of
papers in connection with the generation of anger. In
other papers, loss of support has been used as a
proxy for fear. However, any eliciting event can
produce a multiplicity of emotions. In addition to
anger, arm restraint can initially elicit game-like
smiling, sadness, and disappointment at being put
into what appears to be an undesirable state, or uncertainty in the infant about what is going on with
the arm restraint (see Stenberg & Campos, 1990).
Loss of support elicits avoidance, laughter, or puzzlement, depending on context (Sroufe & Waters,
1976). As Sroufe (1996) noted, it is the meaning of the
event, and not its physical composition, that determines the emotion.
The difficulties inherent in operationalizing emotion by reference to expression, behavior, or eliciting
stimuli does not mean that emotion cannot be identified. How then does one do so? The answer given
by some contemporary emotion theories (Campos &
Barrett, 1984; Frijda, 1986) leads to one reason why
emotion and emotion regulation cannot be dissociated from one another. That answer is as follows:
To classify behaviors as emotion A (e.g., shame) or as
observation or end its disapproving nature.) Feeling accompanies
the evaluation the person makes of the situation and assimilates
into the evaluation of the situation the sensations from the viscera
and skeletal musculature. Feeling can register powerfully in consciousness and serves important monitoring functions, described
later in this paper. Nonetheless, feeling is not the cause or defining
attribute of the emotion, any more than color is the cause or defining attribute of an object.
From Another Perspective: The Nature of Emotion Regulation
emotion B (e.g., fear), we must understand the
function that the selected behaviors serve in interaction with the world, how those behaviors are related to the problem the person is facing, and how
they are playing a role in solving that problem. The
function of the behavior, then, and not its morphology, is the organizing principle behind the classification of emotional reactions; it is what makes
possible differentiating anger from fear, or any
one emotion from any other. In other words, emotional responses can be equipotential. Once one
admits equipotentiality, one necessarily has accepted
regulatory principles into one’s conception of emotionFspecifically, the person’s selection from a palette of different responses that are suitable for
meeting a person’s goals, and in addition, monitoring the effectiveness of the choice.
A One-Factor Alternative: Emotion and Emotion
Regulation Are Concurrent, Coterminous Processes
In preference to a two-factor model of emotion regulation, we propose instead a unitary model that is
based on general systems theory as well as the
writings of Barrett and Campos (1987), Frankel (1999,
2002), Frijda (1986), Holodinski and Friedlander (in
press), and Lazarus (1991). Where appropriate, we
also use conceptualizations explicit in the lead article
by Cole et al. (this issue). The model we present has
four qualities we find highly desirable. First, the
approach is designed to be more integrative, allowing one to explain what both emotion and emotion
regulation involve, as well as how they are typically
indissociable. Second, it allows one to account for
how bad emotions can be good in context, and how
good emotions can be inappropriate and misregulated in other contexts. Third, it places the human being into ever larger but concentric circles of
social influence, from the dyadic to the cultural and
historical. Fourth, it provides novel heuristic principles that can give us new insights into emotion and
emotion regulation across development.
Before we present this model, we would like to
make two caveats. The first is that, analytically and
conceptually, there can be differences between emotion and emotion regulation. This is an important
qualification to what we are about to describe.
However, such a conceptual distinction does not
imply ontological distinctivenessFthat each process
has a separate, real existence that corresponds to the
mental distinction. Such separate existence is what
the lead article by Cole et al. (this issue) somewhat
ambivalently concluded and many commentaries
accepted. We do not accept the assumption that in
379
real life first comes one and then comes the other.
Rather, emotion and emotion regulation are conjoined from the beginning as one observable processFa process that reflects the attempt by the
person to adapt to the problems he or she encounters
in the world.
There is a second caveat. We do believe that
something like the two-step process (first becoming
angry, then counting to 10) does appear to take place.
However, such two-step processes we believe prove
amenable to explanation in the same manner as the
more typical manifestation of emotion, especially
when one considers that emotions, contrary to the
opinions of many (e.g., Ekman, 1992), unfold over
time, are only rarely instantaneous or micromomentary, and often are elicited in conjunction and
in complex ways with other emotions. Therefore,
apparent two-step manifestations of ‘‘emotion then
regulation’’ should not be taken as the prototype of
regulation. Such two-step examples are at best exceptions to the rule, though we later argue that they
are not even exceptions.
Definition of Emotion and Emotion Regulation
Many of the contributions to this special section of
the journal failed to make clear their definitions of
the concepts they were attempting to explain. They
assumed them. To their credit, Cole et al. (this issue)
did make such an attempt. To avoid misunderstanding, we begin our narrative with our brief
working definitions of emotion and emotion regulation. Our working definitions are based on the
following assumption: Human beings encounter
problems, solutions to problems, or ways of sidestepping problems in the course of their adaptation
to social and nonsocial demands of the world in
which they live. These encounters constitute the
setting events for the generation of emotion and
emotion regulation, even for positive emotions such
as love. Both emotion and emotion regulation center
on dealing with the problems of existence and of
adaptation to the reconstructed past, the attributed
present, and the predicted future. Here, then, are our
definitions, based on the assumption just articulated.
Emotion is the process of registering the significance of a physical or mental event, as the individual construes that significance. The nature of
the significance (perceived insult, threat to life, deprecation by another, relinquishment of a desired
state, avoidance or resolution of a problem, etc.)
determines the quality of the emotion. The degree of
perceived significance determines the magnitude of
the emotional response, as well as its urgency.
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Campos, Frankel, and Camras
Emotion regulation is the modification of any
process in the system that generates emotion or its
manifestation in behavior. The processes that modify
emotions come from the same set of processes as
those that are involved in emotion in the first place.
An exception is when a social agent, often mobilized
by his or her own emotions, intervenes to address
one’s problem (as when a mother soothes a hungry
or frightened baby, or when an adult breaks up a
fight between children). Regulation takes place at all
levels of the emotion process, at all times the emotion
is activated, and is evident even before an emotion is
manifested.
How Emotion and Emotion Regulation Draw
on the Same Processes
We propose that emotion and emotion regulation
(recall, differentiated here not ontologically but for
the purpose of analysis) interact at all phases of
their generation, manifestation, and termination. We
illustrate these points, first by arguing that emotion
and its regulation occur concurrently from the outset
of an emotional transaction; second by showing
how emotion and emotion regulation are embodied
in processes that are almost entirely coterminous;
and third by proposing that emotion and regulation
exhibit extraordinary variability, befitting the impressive plasticity the human shows in adapting to
problems posed by the social and nonsocial world.
We also discuss canonical cases of emotion regulation (e.g., wanting to hit someone but counting to 10
instead) and argue, as noted earlier, that such cases
are not distinctive instances of emotional processing.
Emotion Regulation Is Evident Even Before an Emotion
Is Elicited
In this section we discuss the point made by Cole
et al. (this issue) and elsewhere that the proper study
of emotion and emotion regulation involves, first, a
sequence of generating emotion, and then, regulating it by processes different from those of its generation.
Cortical inhibition can precede emotion elicitation. There is widespread agreement that inhibition
is a hallmark of regulation. It is also a principle
evident in emotion generation because in the course
of one emotion or set of emotions being generated,
other emotions and emotion sets are simultaneously
and typically held in check.
If we admit inhibition as a regulatory process, we
must admit that regulation plays a role even before
the elicitation of an emotion. In many cases, the
elicitation of emotion is as much a function of the
release of existing inhibition as it is the direct activation of cerebral emotion circuits. In other words,
emotions reflect the organization of several cortical
and subcortical centers in an intricate network of
mutual influence, some of which preexist the transaction with the significant event. This point was
made clearly by Goldsmith and Davidson (this issue)
and by Lewis and Stieben (this issue) in their commentaries.
Release from inhibition has been proposed for
many years in the explanation of important phenomena in brain – behavior relations. For instance,
foreshadowing recent neuroscientific findings, Sokolov’s (1963) studies of orienting showed that the
cortex actively inhibits arousal centers in the brain
during environmental stimulation. That inhibition is
released only when (a) a process of cortical comparison of stimulus input against neuronal models of
prior stimulation is completed, and (b) a mismatch
occurs between current stimulation and sensory
stores of prior stimulation. The release of inhibition
then permits stimuli coming through alternative
pathways to arouse the reticular formation and other
brain structures that produce the cortical activation,
behavioral arrest, and autonomic response patterns
associated with orienting. Sokolov’s work, then,
showed that orienting responses cannot be said to be
elicited by external events but rather by a complex
orchestration of cerebral phenomena that are only
partially linked to concurrent stimulation. As Goldsmith and Davidson (this issue) and Lewis and
Stieben (this issue) implied, theories of emotion and
emotion regulation must make clear how they deal
with preexisting regulatory processes. Such theories
often do not.
The end of an apparent sequence can influence the beginning of the sequence. A second factor affecting the
generation of emotion from the start is the assessment the person makes, automatically or voluntarily,
of one’s capacities to respond to the event one is facing. If a person can deal with an event, the event
loses much of its emotion-generating impact. It is
short-circuited. For instance, a parachute jumper
whose skill is so proficient and whose confidence in
a successful parachute jump is very great will not
experience jumping from an airplane as stressful
(Fenz, 1974; Fenz & Jones, 1972). It is ‘‘no sweat’’ and
possibly not even thrilling. Remove the skill or remove the confidence and the emotion becomes proportionally more negative and intense. Therefore,
factors apparently late in the process of emotion
generation (choice of response and confidence in
outcome) can affect the unfolding of one’s emotional
From Another Perspective: The Nature of Emotion Regulation
response from the outset of an emotional encounter.
Emotion regulation is not a linear process first involving the elicitation of emotion.
The importance of short-circuiting of appraisals. A
third factor that can affect the initial registration of
the significance of an event also involves short-circuiting of emotion generation. Lazarus and Alfert
(1964) called this form of short-circuiting a form of
cognitive appraisal, but for our purposes, it is better
called a cognitive preappraisal. In the Lazarus and
Alfert study, research participants who were given
instructional sets to the effect that a circumcision rite
about to be viewed on film was not really very
painful and was welcomed by the circumcised adolescents did not show the same level of stress as
control participants given no such instructional set.
In this entire line of research by Lazarus (1999),
future emotional reactions were affected by the
manipulation of expectations that preceded the
emotional transaction.
Nichepicking: Choosing one’s environment influences
one’s emotions. A fourth factor is what we (Campos,
Mumme, Kermoian, & Campos, 1994) and Eisenberg
and Spinrad (this issue) have called nichepicking, a
term inspired by an article on genetics and environment by Scarr and McCartney (1983). Nichepicking
refers to the person avoiding the occasion in which an
undesired emotion is likely to become activated or
choosing settings in which desired emotions will be
likely. An example of nichepicking comes from work
in temperament. Shy infants (e.g., Kagan, in press)
often choose to hang back and not join social groups
until they are more comfortable with what is expected
in that environment; they are slow to warm up, and
they give themselves a chance to scout out the situation and learn expectations before joining social
activity. A clinical example is milieu simplification
(Goldstein, 1939), for example, airplane phobics
choosing not to fly. A commonplace example includes
thrill seekers traveling to amusement parks and
places where thrills abound. Nichepicking is a highly
effective means of regulating emotion at the outset by
minimizing the experience of undesired emotions
and maximizing the experience of desired emotions.
Emotion regulation, in the forms we have mentionedFcortical inhibitory processes, awareness of
response potential, interpretation of eliciting circumstances, nichepicking, and doubtless several
othersFcan thus precede the elicitation of an emotion, in some cases prevent the manifestation of an
emotion in its entirety, and in still other cases change
the quality of the emotion. It seems inescapable to
conclude that regulation and emotion generation
mutually interact from the outset.
381
The Same Processes That Generate Emotions Regulate
Them
As we noted earlier, there are few (some would
say no) environmental stimuli that intrinsically elicit
emotion of any sort. Rather, emotion is the result of a
person – event transaction, a relational phenomenon
whereby an event is assimilated to a process significant to the individual. There are at least four such
processes that render an event significant: (a) the
person’s goals; (b) hedonics (i.e., the generation of
pleasure or pain, or forecasts of a pleasurable or
painful outcome); (c) emotional communication, including the expressive reactions in the face, voice, or
gestures of others, as well as language, all of which
can convey the reflected appraisals of others (Cooley,
1902; Mead, 1934) and are crucial for socialization,
inculcation of values, and cultural transmission; and
(d) past experiences, including those related to parent – child interaction and to socialization, and exposure to and assimilation of cultural rules and
norms (in the interest of cogency, we do not elaborate
on this fourth source of signification separately from
the prior three but interweave its relevance
throughout the paper).
We now show how each of these processes plays a
role both in the generation of emotion and in its
regulation. We call the former role, following Levy
(1973), the constitutive aspect of emotion, and the
latter role the regulatory aspect. Emotions are constitutive because the person constructs the significance of events by linking events to some
personal value or relevance, or coconstructs the significance of events by sharing with others. The constitution of emotion in a transaction yields meanings
that are non-neutral; they are motivating. Emotion is
regulatory insofar as the person, in some way, selects
responses, sequences them, targets them, and
monitors their impact on the problem that set the
stage for the emotion.
Here, again, is an instance where a distinction is
conceptual but not ontological. We explicitly posit
that all but severely pathological of brains are organized so that the act of appraising the significance of
events ineluctably starts to motivate the kinds of
things one might do in response. Constitutive and
regulatory aspects are conceptually distinct only because they have a sequential dependency: In representing what happens when in an emotional state,
people almost always attribute an initial construal of
the event before they construe what to do about it.
However, people cannot start to appraise the significance of an event without starting to be motivated
to respond, and to start regulating their motivation,
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Campos, Frankel, and Camras
their response selection, and their subsequent acquisition of information to appraise. Hence, both constitutive and regulatory aspects of emotion and
emotion regulation are aspects of a unitary process
(see Frankel, 1999; Frankel & Ray, 2001).
Constitutive and regulatory aspects of emotion generation related to goals. There seems to be little argument that there is a link between the generation of
emotion and the assimilation of an event to one’s
goals. For example, if an event facilitates goal attainment, joy ensues, constituting the affective
meaning of the event for the person who has the
goal. If something blocks goal attainment, anger ensues; if an event results in relinquishing a goal,
sadness takes place. The list of linkages of events to
goals is long and quickly becomes complicated.
These linkages have been articulated clearly in the
recent book by Scherer, Schorr, and Johnstone (2001),
and earlier by Frijda (1986) and Barrett and Campos
(1987). We do not summarize the list here. Moreover,
as we remarked earlier, there is an important implication of the now-accepted principle of event –
goal transaction; namely, by virtue of an event being
assimilated to a goal, that transaction also creates a
regulatory constraint such that the responses selected and deployed by the person must be in the
service of the goal of that transaction.
The regulatory behavior one observes in an emotional episode is typically not reflexive, as some
theories of emotion hold (e.g., Plutchick, 1980). As a
general rule, if a person deploys an instrumental
response, that response will reflect an attempt to
establish, maintain, or change the relation of the
person to his or her environment to help attain that
goal or, in some cases, to relinquish it. Instrumental
(voluntary) behaviors illustrate this point best: When
one is afraid, one selects a response, like freezing or
running, aimed at eliminating the threat. Expressive
reactions less obviously show the same purposiveness. If the person deploys an expressive response
(facial, vocal, or gestural), the response will also be in
the service of a goal: It will become an appealFa
social signal designed voluntarily or automatically to
attain an end state through the intermediary of a
social other (Scherer, 1992). Even when a person fails
to manifest a response (e.g., stilling behavior in fear,
or behavioral inaction in passive aggressiveness), the
absence of behavior can directly or indirectly also be
in the service of a goal, in a manner similar to active
behaviors. Contrary to ethics, in emotion the end
does justify the means, or at least the means reveal
what end the person is seeking.
The fact that emotions are linked to goals requires
rethinking the proposition that emotion regulation
necessarily involves change. We consider this proposition intrinsically underspecified and, in one
important sense, incorrect.
First, the proposition must be made more specific,
in a way that demands explicit consideration of the
end state toward which regulation is allowing
change to take place. Change per se is chaotic, unless
and until it is controlled. For example, we consider
an environment, the temperature of which is regulated by a thermostat, to involve not change but
rather change centered around a set pointFthe
ambient temperature desired by the occupants of the
room (see the incisive points made by Hoeksma,
Oosterlan, & Schipper, this issue). Change around a
set point is change that is controlled, in this case, by
the thermostat’s regulatory functioning. Lacking a
principle of control that accounts for the direction of
the temperature change toward some final state,
change in temperature would be random or unidirectional, not corrected by a set point (or, in the
language of dynamic systems theory, an attractor).
Second, we also believe there is one sense in which
the equation of regulation with change is incorrect.
In a regulatory system, the maintenance of constancy
is just as important and effortful as variations around
a set point. Emotion frequently involves constancy of
behavior, as when we identify what we need to do to
reach a goal and keep at it until we attain the desired
outcome. Empirical studies have shown that suppression of emotional display (i.e., maintaining one’s
calm demeanor despite an upset) is very effortful
when the person’s goal is no change of expression in
response to an emotional encounter (Gross & Levenson, 1993). We thus prefer the term control to
change when describing emotion and emotional regulation.
The term control also gives us a method for identifying what changes (or absence of changes) are
dysregulated. In emotion, a selected response or set
of responses can be too intense or not intense enough, they can be of the wrong quality in a particular
context, or they can be in violation of a social norm,
again in certain contexts. In other words, the control
principle can malfunction, resulting in undesired
outcomes or outcomes attained with means that
create more problems in the future. The concept of
change is ambiguous in a way that the notion of
control is not.
Constitutive and regulatory processes related to hedonics. The same dual function of being constitutive
and regulatory applies to hedonicsFthe pleasures
and the pains we experience in many transactions in
life. Pleasure and displeasure are meaningful experiences in and of themselves. The best illustration
From Another Perspective: The Nature of Emotion Regulation
of the constitutive role of hedonics in the generation
of the emotions is in the emotions of desire and
aversion (Frijda, 1986). Desire is the deployment and
regulation of behavior in the interest of attaining a
consummatory endFsuch as sexual intercourse,
eating a delicious meal, or satisfying one’s thirst
(other uses of the term desire are metaphorical).
Aversion is the oppositeFbehaving and modulating
behavior to avoid worse hedonic states than the one
currently being experienced. Desire and aversion
therefore exist because of hedonic processes.
Hedonics also are regulatory. They are feelings
that provide one of the ways by which we monitor
our progress toward goals (Frijda, 1986), leading us
to modify our behavior when we appear to be
straying from our intended outcome or keep our
behavior ‘‘steady as she goes’’ as we move toward an
outcome. Without such hedonic signals, we might
know that we are moving toward or away from a
goal, but we will not be very motivated to change
our behaviors to get back on track.
Hedonics also are crucial in emotion and emotion
regulation because these phenomenological qualities
can become dissociated from their roles as signals in
the service of regulating behavior toward a goal and
instead become ends in themselves. In contrast to the
role of hedonics in desire and aversion, wherein we
typically seek consummatory responses that have as
an accompaniment strong hedonic components, the
hedonics of addiction involve no consummatory responses. Hedonics can thus shift from a monitoring
signal and an accompaniment to consummation to
an end in itself. When that happens so completely as
to undermine the fabric of workplace and interpersonal relationships, hedonic processes have become addictive. Hedonics can be an aspect of an end
state, part of monitoring progress toward a goal and
a directly sought experience (an affective high; the
pleasures of the senses).
The signaling role of hedonics is critically important in the form of behavior regulation called
emotion-focused coping (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984).
There are times when the unpleasantness experienced in dealing with the problems of existence become so great that we direct our attention to
controlling the feeling state and not to addressing the
problem faced in life. Such emotion-focused coping
may be manifested by self-medicating with alcohol
or other mood-altering substances, or invoking the
defense mechanisms of the ego. Such defenses, such
as denial, displacement, reaction formation, repression, and so on, are marked by their not being realistic solutions to certain circumstances; such defense
mechanisms can lead to major physical or health
383
benefits for the individual. Lazarus (1983), for instance, reported in one study that patients who engaged in forms of denial before surgery recovered
better from surgery than others who did not use such
defenses.
The hedonic basis of emotion and emotion regulation was singular by its absence in the lead article
by Cole et al. (this issue) and the associated commentaries. We believe such omission must be corrected in future treatments of emotion and emotion
regulation.
Constitutive and regulatory processes related to emotional communication. Social signals of others are also
both constitutive and regulatory. By social signals,
we mean the manner by which the emotions of
others are manifested in facial, vocal, or gestural
ways (we treat the role of language in generating and
regulating emotion in this section but separately
from what we call social signals.) Social signals are
important in any treatment of emotion and emotion
regulation in at least three ways: (a) they can generate emotion in another, both directly and indirectly; (b) they influence both the quality and the
intensity of an emotion manifested by another personFthat is, they regulate the behavior of others;
and (c) they illustrate how ‘‘no man is an island,
entire unto himself,’’ because social signals, along
with language, are one of the primary means by
which the person is embedded in dyadic, family,
ethnic, and cultural contexts; is exposed to social
rules; and acquires the social norms that determine
the generation and regulation of many emotions.
Few people now doubt that social signals are
regulatory of another person’s behavior. The large
body of literature on social referencing (Campos,
Thein, & Owen, in press; Saarni, Mumme, & Campos, 1998) has documented that from 8.5 months of
age, facial, vocal, and gestural signals directed from
an adult toward a baby can affect the child’s behavior toward that event. At earlier ages, social signals
from others also powerfully affect the infant’s emotional responses, though in this case the social signals are not directed toward a third event but rather
toward the child personally (in what Trevarthen,
1998, called primary intersubjectivity).
It is not very widely recognized that social signals
can be constitutive of emotion. That is, the fact of one
person having an emotion can itself generate an
emotion in an observing person, without reference to
the event that triggered the reaction by the observed
person. One example of such a constitutive role is the
phenomenon of emotional contagion (Hatfield, Cacioppo, & Rapson, 1994). Under certain circumstances that are not well understood, one person’s
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emotional expressions can generate a like emotional
state in someone perceiving that expression. This
phenomenon is so fundamental that aspects of
emotional contagion can be seen in the contagious
crying observed in neonates (Martin & Clark, 1982;
Sagi & Hoffman, 1976; Simner, 1971) and in a multiplicity of other contexts, including contagious
laughter, fear, and disgust (McIntosh, Druckman, &
Zajonc, 1994).
More recently, Campos et al. (in press) proposed a
second way in which social signals are constitutive
of emotion. They held that social signals play a role
in the generation, and in the social construction, of
the emotions of pride, shame, and guilt. They noted
that pride differs from joy insofar as joy can take
place following success (Sroufe & Waters, 1976), including the detection of contingency between a response and an outcome (Watson, 1971). Joy need
have no social context, though it usually does have
one. However, the context of eliciting pride necessarily involves the reflected appraisals of the parents or significant figures in the environment as
manifested in their enthusiastic applause, vocalizations, gestural expansiveness, and words of praise.
When internalized, these reflected appraisals become the basis of pride. Indeed, the puffed-up chest
and the expansive gesturing of the arms indicative of
pride may be internalizations in the child of the behaviors the child observes in the parents. The perception of the approval of a significant other is itself
significant.
The constitutive role of social signals in shame is
similar but involves the expression of different
emotions by the significant figure in the environment. There probably is a precursor emotion to
shame, as joy is to pride. If so, the precursor may
reside in the disappointment and frustration experienced by a child when encountering failure at a
task. However, in shame as in pride, the reflected
appraisals of a significant other convert the emotional response observed in a given situation to a
shameful one. Shame is constituted by the disappointment, the anger, the verbal disapproval, and
the scorn or contempt the other person directs at the
target person. Without that opprobrium and without
the emoting person being significant to the perceiver
of the social signals, there is no shame. The fact of a
significant other’s disapproval itself has impact.
It is interesting that some emotions do not play a
role in generating shame. One example is the fear
expressed by others. In contrast to the emotions described previously, fear expressions by the other directed at the person doing the disapproved act does
not appear to generate shame. However, fear does
potentially play a crucial role in the generation of
guilt, as does the suffering, sadness, or pain experienced by another to the extent that one attributes
these emotions to one’s actions. As with shame, not
every emotion attributed to one’s behavior is the
source of guilt. One does not feel guilty if the person
whom one has hurt shows scorn, anger, or contempt
toward the perpetrator, nor does the perpetrator feel
guilt if the aggrieved other laughs or smiles. The
constitutive role of social signals is thus specific to
specific emotions. What we propose here is not in
line with circumflex models of emotional expression
that reduce the latter largely or exclusively to factors
such as pleasantness or unpleasantness and level of
activation (Russell, 1980). Emotional signaling, being
constitutive exchanges involving specific interpersonal meanings, has different effects depending
on the context in which the signaling takes place.
These considerations about pride, shame, and
guilt lead us to the conclusion that the principles
involved in the generation of emotion and the regulation of emotion are largely the same. Moreover,
social signals, along with the use of language, constitute the major route by which the child is exposed
to the norms and rules of the larger community
within which the child operates. Culture can be said
to be, among other things, a system of values (Saarni
et al., 1998). Values are best communicated by the
combination of verbal and paralinguistic sources of
communication.
Raver’s (this issue) commentary raises many crucial points about how culture and ethnicity affect the
generation and the regulation of emotion. Culture,
itself a collection of shared constitutive and regulatory processes, affects emotion and emotional
regulation in many ways: by affecting what is important or not important to oneself, by determining
which behaviors are deemed appropriate and which
are not, and by specifying how one should feel and
behave in certain contexts (e.g., Hochschild, 1979).
A good illustration of the relevance of culture to
emotion and emotion regulation comes from comparisons of the inhibited temperamental style described by Kagan (in press) as evaluated in American
and Chinese cultures (see Holodinski & Friedlander,
in press). In this country, temperamental inhibition is
not highly valued; most of us prefer our children to
be assertive, bold, and sociable. Consequently, we
often link temperamental inhibition to emotional
dysregulation. In China, by contrast, temperamentally inhibited children are valued (Chen, Rubin, &
Li, 1995). Shyness is considered to be an indication of
willingness by the child to obey the rules of the
culture, of being studious and hard working, and of
From Another Perspective: The Nature of Emotion Regulation
keeping his or her place in the culturally prescribed
order of status.
This illustration, along with the examples enumerated by Raver (this issue), should lead to caution
about equating certain types of behavior (such as
shyness) as bad or dysregulated and other types of
behavior as good or well regulated. Often, what is
good or bad is a function of the context and the
culture in which one is growing up.
A second example is relevant to this point. Many
studies of emotion regulation center on the control of
aggressive or hostile behavior in children (Garber &
Dodge, 1991). Those studies have as their aim the
identification of the etiology of aggressive behavior
and the steps that can be taken to control such aggressiveness. However, in some cultures aggressiveness is not perceived as bad. In her study of
toddlers growing up in Baltimore, Miller and Sperry
(1987) documented how mothers socialize their
toddlers to engage in aggressive behavior in the interest of defending themselves in a neighborhood
where such hostile behavior is often called for. Miller
and Sperry reported how mothers socialized their
toddlers to be aggressive in a manner appropriate to
their environment by calling them sissies when the
children cried and did not counterattack following
an assault by someone else. Yet the mothers did not
give their child carte blanche to behave brutally. If
the child showed aggressiveness when the mothers
thought there was no circumstance they deemed
appropriate for the aggressiveness, they called the
toddlers spoiled. The point here is that the mothers
of these children had values that differed in significant ways from those of the majority culture,
instilled those values through paralinguistic and
verbal means (teasing, name calling, showing disapproval of manifestations of pain or suffering, and
emotionally encouraging aggressiveness the mothers
deemed appropriate). To call anger and aggressiveness good or bad independent of the context in
which emotion is shown is thus an error.
Taken as a whole, these studies have documented
how powerfully factors of emotional communicational (including linguistic factors) enter into the
socialization of emotion and emotion regulation
behaviors in toddlers, and how the culture can determine whether the same behavior is valued positively or not.
Explaining ‘‘canonical’’ instances of two-factor emotion regulation. What we have called the canonical
manifestation of emotion regulation (i.e., first one
has an emotion; then one regulates it) is in our
opinion a form of conflict resolution. It is also a kind
of emotion regulation that involves much more
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socialization, experience, and cognitive processing
capabilities than the types of emotion and emotion
regulation shown by the young child. Above all, it
reflects a much more voluntary and willful self-regulation than is the case for the type of emotion regulation seen in infants and toddlers. All in all, the
canonical manifestation is no more representative
of emotion regulation than formal operations is
representative of cognition. It demands too much
development to be the prototype of regulation.
We now elaborate briefly on the idea of conflict
resolution that we see as central in the canonical
instance. The conflict involves two emotions, each of
which operates under the same principles we described previously. However, each emotion serves a
different goal from the other. For example, a person
may have a sexual desire but hold it in check for fear
of rejection by the other. The conflict in the canonical
instance is complicated by being slow in developing;
such instances typically involve a fast-acting, impulsive emotion that requires minimal processing
resources and a slower developing emotion reflecting better socialized goals to which the mature self is
committed (see Loewenstein, Reed, & Baumeister,
2003). Although the latter typically involves higher
moral value, the former, more impulsive emotion can
often gain what Frijda (1986) called control precedence.
That is, the action tendency becomes strong and
strives for immediate execution. However, because
emotions intrinsically involve monitoring of anticipated consequences of one’s selecting a response
tendency, the emergence of the second, slower activating emotion can result in the inhibition of the
impulses despite their lack of initial control precedence. As a result of such monitoring of the consequences of executing a behavioral strategy, the
influence of the slower, more cognitively demanding emotion begins slowly to be felt. People thus
often find themselves restraining the lower precedence, fast-acting impulse (typically in the voluntary fashion described by Eisenberg & Spinrad, this
issue).
If this analysis is correct, the canonical instance of
emotion regulation can be observed only in older
children, adolescents, and adults. It is a form of
meta-emotion (Gottman, Katz, & Hooven, 1997), requiring a cognitive capacity to reflect on one’s
emotions and, in part, voluntarily decide what to do.
Infants and toddlers would not be expected to
show much evidence of this type of emotional conflict. The fact that infants and toddlers clearly can
regulate their emotions even before having the capacity for meta-emotion shows that the canonical
instance is not truly representative of fundamental
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Campos, Frankel, and Camras
emotion-regulation processes. The canonical instance is developmentally a late-onset phenomenon.
Therefore, even in this seemingly canonical ‘‘first
emotion, then regulation’’ situation, we believe the
processes involved continuously reflect the constitutive and regulatory processes that enter into significant transactions with the world. Whatever their
relative precedence, both responses (e.g., the urge to
hit someone and the deep breath one takes to hold
matters in check) are linked to emotion, and both
responses are regulated from the outset. Indeed, it
can take more regulated care, for example, to steal a
tempting object undetected than to walk away from
one. Only in a colloquial, introspective sense does it
appear that the slower, higher precedence response
is regulating the faster, lower precedence impulse
that it is supplanting. However, each response option
is itself both constitutive and regulatory. That is, each
response option reflects construals and goals that are
different from each other, yet both construals are
constitutive and both goals set regulatory targets.
Stealing the coveted object is motivated by positive
emotions but also risks negative emotions. Motivated more powerfully to prevent those negative
emotions, the person instead counts to 10, is careful
not to betray any impulse to steal the object, and then
does not steal the object.
Developmental Implications
We now pose the question that Cole et al. (this issue)
posed to themselves: What does the conceptual framework we have elaborated buy us in terms of guiding new research? Elaborating the developmental
implications of what we have just proposed about
emotion and emotion regulation would require a
monograph unto itself. We can at best be selective
about developmental implications in what we have
described.
An Epigenetic Approach to the Development of Emotion
and Emotion Regulation
Few have speculated on how emotion and emotion regulation develop. At best, we assume that
maturational processes account for changes in both,
but we rarely test the assumption. Sometimes, cognitive development is given the central role as the
major organizer of emotional changes with age, but
most approaches merely correlate cognition and
emotion in an attempt to identify synchronies in
development. At other times, researchers remain
agnostic about the underlying processes accounting
for the organization of development, leaving behind
phenomena in search of explanation. The approach
proposed here postulates sets of epigenetic processes
that account for the development of emotion and
emotion regulation. By epigenesis, we mean only
that one developmental acquisition makes possible
experiences that lay the stage for new and enduring
developmental acquisitions, not that there is a single
epigenetic trajectory that all individuals follow.
Development of Instrumental Behaviors Affects Emotion
and Emotion Regulation
The field of emotional development has missed
out on the study of several periods of rapid and
important developmental transitions in emotion and
emotion regulation in the child by not considering
the epigenetic consequences of motor development
of the infant and young child. We earlier argued that
equipotentiality of responses is a hallmark of emotion and emotion regulation. Such equipotentiality
must be intrinsically limited at the beginning of life,
becoming progressively richer with age as the child
develops new means of responding to and dealing
with the world. These means include scanning,
reaching, crawling, walking, and speaking, which
form a generally ordinal series of increasingly complex means of behaving and attaining goals. As each
of these skills develops, response options increase in
number, and a child’s emotional dealings can become more flexible.
If there is any truth to the proposal that the development of instrumental behavior can profoundly
affect emotion and emotion regulation, it comes as a
surprise to us that so little work has been devoted to
understanding how the progressive enrichment of
motoric options for the infant and child affects the
child’s emotional life. There have been only a scattering of studies of how reaching affects the emotional life of the infant (Witherington, 1998), how
crawling reorganizes the infant and family system
of interactions (Campos, Kermoian, & Zumbahlen,
1992), how walking influences emotion and emotion
regulation (Biringen, Emde, Campos, & Applebaum,
1995), and how language and emotion interact
(Bloom, 1993). Only the scanning and head turning
behavior of the infant has been investigated with
some degree of thoroughness (Field & Fogel, 1982).
In short, the increasing voluntarization of the
child’s responding (see Eisenberg & Spinrad, this
issue) is a major area ripe for exploration. It must
constitute a major step (though not the first one) in
the development of emotion and emotion regulation
and how such processes can go awry. For example,
some mothers welcome the onset of crawling as a
From Another Perspective: The Nature of Emotion Regulation
sign of the baby’s increasing autonomy; others rue it.
The different meanings of crawling for different
mothers thus must create very different social contexts for the child’s affective life, influencing both
social regulation and self-regulation.
Developments in Language Affect Emotion and Emotion
Regulation
Let us consider the importance we have given to
emotional communication. A major aspect of such
communication is language. We consider language
to be both a constitutive and a regulatory process for
emotion. It is the means par excellence (although not
the only one) by which cultural values are inculcated
into the child. It is a major means by which children
shift from a demanding or petulant but indistinct
expressiveness of what they want to the more specific forms of requesting that a need be met that
language affords. Language also facilitates, perhaps
even makes possible the beginnings of, the process of
negotiation, by which the child and the socializing
agents coconstruct a mutually acceptable outcome.
The acquisition of language, therefore, must be a
major milestone in the study of emotion and emotion
regulation.
What kinds of studies of emotion and language
are there in the literature? We have a modest literature on the acquisition of an emotion lexicon
(Bretherton & Beeghly, 1982), studies on how emotion signaling and language influence each other’s
development (Bloom, 1993), and investigations of the
ways that different cultures construe the nature of
emotion by their language usage (Wierzbicka, 1994),
yet there are remarkably few studies showing how
the acquisition of language affects the organization
of emotional development. We therefore call for investigations of how language constitutes emotions
by conveying values, including praise, rejection,
drawing attention to the emotional reactions of others, and so on. We need to understand how language
acquisition and skill helps change how emotions are
manifested, and how language communicates some
emotions such as scorn or contempt more easily than
nonverbal expressions.
Language also becomes interiorized, resulting
in much better self-regulation, as Luria and Judovich (1956/1959) proposed. In fact, the interiorization of language must be pivotal for personality
development and the fantasy world of the child. We
need to revisit the work of Luria and others to understand the role of language, expressed openly or
interiorized, in emotion and emotion regulation.
This paper is a clarion call for studies of how
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language acquisition affects emotion and emotion
regulation (see also Holodinski & Friedlander, in
press).
Coregulation of Social Signals and Interiorization
Processes in the Development of Emotion and Emotion
Regulation
Another point of entry into developmental transitions in emotion and emotion regulation comes
from the study of the differentiation of emotional
expressions (or social signals). The studies by Camras (1992) and her colleagues (e.g., see Camras, Oster,
Campos, & Bakeman, 2003) have called into question
the view that infants produce expressions of discrete
negative emotions (e.g., anger, sadness, fear) during
the first few months of life. Her work makes clear
that we know very little about when facial, vocal, or
gestural expressive patterns become adult-like.
Camras’s conclusions about the lack of early differentiation of expressions have profound implications
for understanding emotion and emotion regulation.
To the extent that infants use expressions as a means
of influencing their relation to the world (i.e., by influencing others), lack of differentiation of expressions implies that social agents must use a
multiplicity of factors (including the infants’ nonfacial body and vocal behaviors) to interpret the infants’ emotion. To the extent that young infants’
nonfacial behaviors are themselves undifferentiated
(e.g., because of their limited motor capabilities),
social agents must rely on context.
Furthermore, undifferentiated facial expressions
and bodily reactions may imply a lack of differentiation in infants’ negative emotional experience
itself (e.g., they may experience nonspecific distress
rather than discrete anger, sadness, etc.). This suggests the possibility raised by Gergely and Watson
(1996, 1999) that a form of social biofeedback is essential for the infant or child to construct emotional
states, in particular, discrete feelings. Social biofeedback refers to the process wherein the parent, by
selectively exaggerating and mirroring the infant’s
expressions, helps shape the expressions into more
regular patterns and enables the child to match the
feedback from his or her emotional expressions to his
or her feeling states. Gergely and Watson’s approach
is a superb instantiation of the constitutive and regulatory aspects of emotional expressions, and provides a window into understanding how such
expressive responses can be used in more complex
ways at later ages to help acculturate the child. The
study of the development of emotional expressions
and their synchrony and coordination with the
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Campos, Frankel, and Camras
expressions of caregivers constitutes a major implication of the model we propose here.
Still another implication of our model arises from
the fact that early in life, the infant’s emotion and
emotion regulation is largely regulated by external
agents. This follows from the motoric limitations
evident in early life. In those early months, the infant
and the caregiver constitute a coregulatory system.
However, as the baby develops, that coregulation
changes, and eventually the child starts to take increasing control over regulatory processes. This
control is evident in a variety of ways, including the
child’s beginning use of emotional expressions in a
voluntary, intentional, and instrumental fashion
(again, see the commentary by Eisenberg & Spinrad,
this issue). We have no systematic literature on this
important development shift from dyadic coregulation (which in a way, not unlike a Piagetian primary
scheme, is never lost with advancing age) to increasingly self-organized deployment of emotional
resources. As new cognitive skills (especially symbolic skills) enter into play, emotion and emotion
regulation begin to take new forms. In particular,
emotion memories become enduring (indeed, a recent study by Hertenstein & Campos, in press, has
noted a developmental shift in memory for emotional interactions between 11 and 14 months). The
very process of emotion and emotion regulation thus
undergoes major developmental changes in the first
15 months of life, and doubtless, these changes
forecast major developmental changes to come. For
articulate examples of how the development of
symbolic processes may affect emotional development, see Mascolo and Fischer (1995) and Mascolo
and Harkins (1998).
Identifying Preexisting Processes That Affect the
Manifestation of Emotion
In discussing how emotion regulation plays a role
from the very outset of an emotion-inducing episode,
we believe we have pointed to an important line of
work that needs systematic investigation. We know
that a child’s ongoing state powerfully affects his or
her reaction to pain. In particular, when the child is
in non-rapid-eye-movement sleep (NREM states),
pain reactions appear to be minimal compared with
painful stimulation encountered during drowsy,
waking, or REM states (Porter, 1990). This phenomenon requires further confirmation and extension in
age and to other stressors.
Another instance of preexisting processes playing
a role in emotion and emotion regulation is arousal
transfer (Zillman, Katcher, & Milavsky, 1972). A high
state of arousal experienced in emotion state A can
create a background that adds to the intensity of the
experience of emotion state B. For example, the
arousal an adult experiences when anger can affect
the intensity of that person’s sexual desire.
The phenomenon of arousal transfer has not been
studied developmentally to the best of our knowledge. However, it is a phenomenon mothers intuitively know well. Mothers realize that a child who
is running and laughing gleefully in a vigorous game
can quickly shift to extraordinarily intense crying if
the child encounters something negative (e.g., falling)Fcrying that would not be so intense if the child
had not become so ‘‘worked up’’ by the excited
laughing and running. The effects of background
state, arousal transfer, and similar phenomena (including Dodge & Pettit’s, 2003, hostile attribution
bias) point to the importance not only of studying
how preexisting processes influence the generation
and intensity of emotional experiences but also how
these biases operate differently at different developmental levels of the child.
We hope that these examples illustrate sufficiently the heuristic value of the principles we have
proposed in this paper and the need to study each
of the principles with a developmental point of
view.
Methodological Implications for the Study of Emotion
and Emotion Regulation
The Need for an Interpretational Methodology in
Preference to an Operationalist Methodology
One of the major implications of the model we
have presented is methodological. We remind the
reader of a pivotal point in the history of the study of
socioemotional development. In 1977, the concept of
attachment, defined operationally after Bowlby
(1969) as physical proximity seeking, began to encounter many difficulties related to the lack of consistency of individual differences expected to be
shown across age and contexts. Clearly, physical
proximity (measured by physical distance of the
child from the caretaker) is a superb indicator of attachment early in life (see Cohen & Campos, 1974).
By 18 months, physical proximity seeking is no
longer the sensitive indicator of attachment it had
once been. When that apparent theoretical inconsistency was noted, the concept of attachment was in
danger of being the baby who is thrown out with the
bathwater; as disaffection in physical proximity
seeking as an operationalization of attachment grew,
so did disaffection with the construct of attachment.
From Another Perspective: The Nature of Emotion Regulation
In one of the most important papers written in the
study of emotion, Sroufe and Waters (1977) argued
for an approach that did justice to the meaning of
behavior and that permitted taking into account alternative manifestations of the proximity-seeking
hallmark of attachment. They noted how a child
could show security in the presence of the parent in
many ways, and coders thus had to be sensitive to the
organization of behavior, to the possibility that different behaviors could be in the service of the same
function of attaining felt security (e.g., a child could
show social referencing or a pickup bidFconsidered
as alternative means of seeking contact with the
motherFwhile not showing any change in physical
proximity). Sroufe and Waters provided evidence
that taking an organizational, interpretational approach to the behaviors of infants in the Strange Situation revealed unexpectedly strong continuities in
the classification of infants as secure, avoidant, or
ambivalent. Few can argue with the success of the
recommendations of Sroufe and Waters, which led
the study of attachment to become the dominant
approach in socioemotional development over the
past quarter century.
We believe that a similar approach is called for in
the study of emotion and emotion regulation. Like
Sroufe and Waters (1977), we call for the study of
patterns of behavior and behavior interpreted in context as the appropriate first step in the study of emotion (Camras, et al., 2002). A similar call was made
long ago by Miller and Sperry (1987), who noted the
many advantages of the study of narratives, as was the
eloquent appeal by Jessor (1996) for the importance of
ethnographic methods in the study of human development. Our methods must do justice to the meaning
of behavior to be effective in revealing important
findings about emotion and emotion regulation.
The Proper Role of Experimentation and
Operationalization
Our recommendation does not imply that we
should abandon experimentation and careful quantification of objectively specified expressive, instrumental, or physiological responses. Rather, we are
proposing that such standard experimental methods
not be the de facto standard or the default method
for empirical research in the study of emotion and
emotion regulation. The merits of experimentation
and objective quantification must be weighed
against the strict constraints such methods place on
the generalization and ecological validity of findings
using such methods. At the least, converging research methods that combine experimentation with
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confirmatory ethnographic reports of behaviors in
the real world need to be considered.
Coherence or Equifinality in Measuring Emotion and
Emotion Regulation?
A second methodological implication of the approach we are proposing is to challenge research
approaches that search for the coherence of emotional behaviorFthat look for moderate to high
correlations among dependent indexes of emotion.
The commitment to coherence of responses is strong
in the field. That commitment may be an atavism of
psychology’s quest for a general factor in psychological processes such as intelligence, or the desire to
confirm the presence of a general factor such as
arousal in measures of emotion (Duffy, 1962), or a
misunderstanding of the principle of converging
research operations (Garner, Hake, & Erickson,
1956). Whatever the reason, researchers typically feel
most comfortable making inferences about emotion
when behavior, physiology, and, where appropriate,
self-report cohere (see Cole et al.’s point in the lead
article, this issue). But coherence in emotion measures may be a holy grail not to be found.
We believe that, more often than not, emotion and
emotion regulation are evident in the selection of one
behavior pattern over another, that is, in the equifinality of different responses and not in their coherence. Let us take studies of infant behavior on the
visual cliff as an example. Coherence of emotional
behaviors is a rarity in such studies, despite the fact
that the cliff is widely considered to be one of the
strongest elicitors of fear in the human infant (Scarr
& Salapatek, 1970). Let us consider three typical behavior patterns seen in tests on the visual cliff to
demonstrate how coherence of indexes of fear is
lacking while the observer clearly infers the presence
of fear or wariness.
Most tests on the visual cliff involve determining
whether the infant will cross to the mother over the
deep side of the cliff or not. One prototypical pattern
shown by infants beyond a certain age and experience locomoting is one of complete reluctance to
cross the deep side and, indeed, a backing away from
the apparent drop-off. At the precise moment the
infant is avoiding crossing the cliff, the infant is
likely to be smiling. Smiling and avoidance should
not go together in a fear state, but they do. Which
index should we trustFthe moving away from the
edge or the smiling of the baby?
There is a second pattern observed in some 20% of
infants from which one can infer fear or wariness. An
alternative to avoidance of crossing the deep side at
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Campos, Frankel, and Camras
all is what we have called detour crossing, wherein
the infant will not cross over the deep side to the
mother on a beeline but will cross to the mother by
holding onto the side wall of the cliff and tiptoeing
on the thin shelf that supports the safety glass until
the baby reaches her. This alternative behavior is
typically not accompanied by smiling; therefore,
successful resolution of a conflict by the detour does
not cohere with facial expressions expected with
successful problem solving.
The third pattern of behavior on the cliff is evident
when infants are tested slightly differently on the
cliff: When the infant is placed directly atop the cliff,
the child shows intense emotional expressions and
freezing rather than avoidance; smiling is never observed and rarely is avoidance or escape. Therefore,
one pattern involves avoidance and smiling, the
second involves approach via detour but no smiling,
and the third involves neither avoidance nor approach and no smiling. Facial movements of distress
are typically seen only in the third case. Given these
patterns of behavior on the cliff, correlations among
indexes of emotion in any single visual cliff study
will necessarily be low and thus not coherent. They
are not what is expected by most researchers in
emotion when dealing with intense emotional states.
Yet, despite the lack of coherence observed in visual
cliff tests, no observer escapes the conclusion that
strong emotion has been elicited by the virtual dropoff. We believe the inescapability of the conclusion
comes from the recognition of functional equifinality
of the infant’s attempts to prevent harm, despite the
variation (equipotentiality) in emotional responding
in this context.
We thus conclude that coherence of behavior is
neither typical nor expectable in studies of emotion,
even under conditions of intense negative transactions. Rather, there are patterns of alternative manifestations of emotional behavior in any emotional
encounter. This principle of equipotentiality of responses in the service of equifinality of outcome will
surely apply even more robustly to less intense
emotional transactions than settings such as the visual cliff.
Affective Neuroscience and Its Relation to Emotion and
Emotion Regulation
Many researchers have marshaled substantial
amounts of evidence from the findings of affective
neuroscience (see especially the commentaries in this
issue by Bell & Wolfe; Goldsmith & Davidson; Lewis
& Stieben). Researchers universally recognize the
extraordinary promise of this new approach to in-
quiry into emotion and its regulation (for an excellent, accessible primer, see Brett, Johnsrude, &
Owen, 2002). However, affective neuroscience is
clearly a nascent field, as Goldsmith and Davidson
(this issue) remarked unequivocally, and is furthermore one with extraordinarily serious and, in some
cases, intractable technological problems. These
problems limit its ability to shed light on the processes involved in emotion and emotion regulation.
We thus think it appropriate to offer a coda on affective neuroscience to this section on methodology.
Contrast affective neuroscience with the bases for
progress in the more established neuroscience of
vision. Both sensory psychophysics and visual perception have found numerous phenomena that show
strong mathematically specifiable relations between
physical stimulation and psychological statesFrelations that are robust within and across individual human beings and across mammalian
species. Moreover, the components of visual stimulation can be identifiedFedges, color, size, orientation, motion, depth, and many more. Most of these
features can be specified geometrically, both in the
physical world and in their projection as light onto
membranes such as the retina. These discrete features can be experimentally manipulated to determine whether it is a component of the pattern of
stimulation, or the pattern itself, that elicits the sensory experience or the percept. Furthermore, singlecell recording, animal models, lesion studies, and
data from functional magnetic resonance imaging
(fMRI) have been used as converging research operations to provide substantial confidence that relations exist among environmental stimulation, visual
perception, and specific aspects of brain function.
By contrast, affectogenic stimuli, such as the International Affective Picture System (Center for the
Study of Emotion and Attention, 1994) or film clips
chosen to induce emotions (Gross & Levenson, 1995),
are not nearly so regular in their stimulus – response
relations as are the relations (let us say) between
frequencies of light and experience of color, or binocular stimulation and stereoscopic vision. In studies
conducted in affective neuroscience, the same person
can have different emotional responses to a given
elicitor in different contexts on the same day, or even
in a single experimental situation that places different
task demands on the participant (Lange et al., 2003).
Affectogenic stimuli are not easily broken down into
component features that can be varied separately to
ensure that it is the emotional quality of the transaction and not some simple physical difference residing
in contrasting stimuli that accounts for the differences
in brain activation. For example, varying the number
From Another Perspective: The Nature of Emotion Regulation
of cute, fuzzy animals depicted in a slide may not
have the utility for affective science that varying the
amount of color saturation has for vision science. Rat
and primate models of emotion do not readily or
necessarily generalize to other species. Lesion data,
both within species and across species, are much
more ambiguous for emotion than for vision. A region of interest for emotion research, the frontal cortex (FC), is the most irregular of gray matter
structures, making localization of FC function unreliable. For these reasons, differential emotional activation of brain regions can neither be produced nor
interpreted with the precision of visual neuroscience.
The instruments also impose limitations. The
newest instrument, fMRI, offers better spatial and
temporal resolution than positron emission tomography (PET) and incomparably better spatial
resolution and completeness than either electroencephalography (EEG) or magnetoencephalography
(MEG). Even so, yielding several orders of magnitude fewer voxels than the brain has neurons, fMRI
spatial resolution is coarse. For instrumentation of
real-time processes such as emotion and its regulation, the temporal resolution of fMRI is seriously
limited, both in the sampling rates that are feasible
and in the low differentiation of hemodynamic response to closely sequenced events. Also, both EEG
and fMRI data are easily made uninterpretable by
movement, requiring experimental situations where
participants’ movement is largely prevented. EEG
and fMRI thus record the emotions of a research
participant who is in reality an audience, watching
events presumed to be emotional in a narrowly
constrained slide show or on the ‘‘screen’’ of his or
her memory. The methods used in affective neuroscience are not yet mature enough to characterize
the family of real-time constitutive and regulatory
processes in emotion and emotional regulation
Fprocesses that, having much greater equipotentiality than vision, are much harder to study.
It is not surprising that preliminary findings are
mixed. For example, in a recent meta-analysis of
more than 50 whole-brain fMRI studies for affective
stimuli with respect to 22 brain regions, Phan, Wager,
Taylor, and Liberzon (2002) determined that only the
relation between the amygdala and fear was found
in more that 50% of studies, and activation of the
insula co-occurred with sadness in more than 40% of
studies. All other localities occurred less frequently
in both cortical and subcortical regions reviewed.
This level of replication is lower than is typical in the
neuroscience of basic visual functionsFlow enough
to demand caution in drawing inferences about
brain – behavior relations in affect. (Imagine, in the
391
clinical literature, touting a change in standard of
care, based on a 40% meta-analytic showing for a
new treatment.) We are starting to learn what brain
regions might be differentially implicated in different emotions. However, we know so little about the
contributions of the regions implicated in affect that
we cannot begin to decide whether emotion has locality in the brain or if emotion is an emergent
property of other kinds of functional activations,
such as the orchestration of different regions of the
brain. A trustworthy map of the brain regions implicated in emotion and what they do, individually
and in interaction, is still far away.
In sum, the contributions to this special issue,
along with our own reading of the literature, reveal
three important features of affective neuroscience: (a)
there is an impressive capacity to start ‘‘lifting up the
skull’’ and to study brain structure and function; (b)
affective neuroscience is not yet strong enough or
replicable enough to be used to explain much about
real-life emotional phenomena, especially in early
life; and (c) reports and interpretations in affective
neuroscience are sometimes expressed with excessive
confidence, in light of the limitations of the instruments and the stimuli, and questionable internal
and external validity of the experimental paradigms.
Despite the seductive attractiveness of unprecedented forms of instrumentation that promise to
move toward hard science, affective neuroscience is
not yet close to the consensual bases for confidence of
demonstration that is typical of hard sciences.
Conclusion
In summary, we have proposed that emotion and
emotion regulation are not two separate phenomena
but are different facets of a single set of processes. We
use the term emotion to stand for the meaning of a
transaction between a person and an event, including what, in general, a person can do about the
transaction. We use the term emotion regulation to
refer to the variations in what a person can do depending on different contexts. The two words, while
conceptually distinguishable, have the same referentFdealing with a person – environment problem.
Emotion and emotion regulation involve equipotentiality of responding to the world in the service of
promoting equifinal outcomes, rendering operational definitions problematic and identification of
the goal of the behavior essential. Future research
needs to look at emotion and emotion regulation as
well as their development from a very different
vantage point than has been the case and to use
methods that do justice to the meanings, goal
392
Campos, Frankel, and Camras
relevant and otherwise, that produce, reside in, and
guide emotional behavior. Emotions are not good or
bad, in and of themselves, except when context
makes them so.
We believe there is ample historical precedent for
these ideas. Their roots can be traced at least to
Aristotle, who instantiated emotion and emotion
regulation well in this quote from his Nicomachean
Ethics: ‘‘The person who is angry at the right things
and toward the right people and also in the right
way, at the right time, and for the right length of
time, is praised’’ (1999, p. 61).
The rub for the study of emotion and emotion
regulation is in the use of the word right. What has
made the study of emotion and emotion regulation
extraordinarily difficult and confusing is neglecting,
from the outset, to partition the question of suitability of goalsFthe rightness of goalsFfrom the
question of adequacy of goal accomplishmentFthe
rightness of the constitutive and regulatory processes that activate and accomplish goals in response
to events, whatever a person’s goals and whatever
their suitability. This fundamental distinction between suitability, a moral question, and adequacy, a
pragmatic question, is the point of departure for
another paper.
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