Foundations and Extensions for the Extended Model: More on Implicit and Explicit Forms of Emotion Regulation

Gross’s Extended Process Model of Emotion Regulation (or EPM) draws on insights from the psychology of action control to consider not just the strategies that people use to regulate their emotions, but also how people decide when and how to regulate, and go about implementing their chosen strategy. This commentary seeks to extend the action control perspective on emotion regulation even further to connect the EPM with extant frameworks on self-regulation. In this regard, we consider the relation between emotions and behavior, conflict between emotional goals, the nature of the reference value toward which regulation is directed, and the dynamics of emotion regulation. We then consider two issues only touched on by Gross’s review – automatic (or implicit) emotion regulation and (ii) interpersonal (or extrinsic) emotion regulation.