Cognition and Emotion: The Cognitive Regulation of Emotions : A Review

One of life’s great challenges is successfully regulating emotions (Gross, 2002). The topic of emotion regulation has been of interest since Freud (1923) began to examine the relationship between the control of affective impulses and psychic health ( Krohne et al., 2002) . The emerging field of emotion regulation studies how individuals influence which emotions they have, when they have them, and how they experience and express them. Emotion regulation is defined and distinguished from coping, mood regulation, defense, and affect regulation (Gross, 1998). Many studies have been conducted in the field of cognition and emotion; e.g., emotion regulation: Past, present, future (Gross, 1999), the cognitive regulation of emotions: The role of success versus failure experience and coping dispositions (Krohne et al., 2002), the cognitive control of emotion (Ochsner and Gross, 2005), relationships between cognitive emotion regulation strategies and depressive symptoms: A comparative study of five specific samples, (Garnefski and Kraaij, 2002), incorporating emotion regulation into conceptualizations and treatments of anxiety and mood disorders (Campbell-Sills et al., 2007), healthy and unhealthy emotion regulation: Personality processes, individual differences, and life span development (John and Gross, 2004), emotion regulation in adulthood: Timing is everything (Gross, 2001 ),emotional states, attention, and working memory. Emotion regulation in depression: Relation to cognitive inhibition (Joormann and Gotlib, 2010), individual differences in two emotion regulation processes: Implications for affect, relationships, and well-being (Gross and John, 2003), mindfulness and emotion regulation: The development and initial validation of the Cognitive and Affective Mindfulness Scale-Revised (CAMS-R)(Laurenceau, 2007), regulation of distress and negative emotions: A developmental view (Kopp, 1989), basic emotions, relations among emotions, and emotion-cognition relations (Izard, 1992), emotional reactivity and cognitive regulation in anxious children, (Carthy, 2010)