Emotion Regulation in Everyday Life

Sometimes, our emotions lead us to do the oddest things. Grown men pull over so they can brawl over which driver is the bigger idiot. Parents lose their cool and bark hateful things at their children that they later regret. Adolescents who were best friends before a jealous spat vow never to speak again. And children throw tantrums as if on cue at the supermarket candy display. Moments such as these are reminders of the fundamental role that emotion regulation plays in civilized life. Emotions can be helpful, providing crucial information about the state of one's interactions with the world (Clore, 1994) or speeding one's responses in life-threatening situations (Frijda, 1986). However, people frequently experience strong emotions that need to be managed if they are to keep their appointments, careers, and friendships. Indeed, successful emotion regulation is a prerequisite for adaptive functioning. To get along with others, one must be able to regulate which emotions one has and how one experiences and expresses these emotions. Over the past 2 decades, emotion regulation has become the focus of intense research activity in both child (e.g., Thompson, 1991) and adult (e.g., Gross, 1998) literatures, as demonstrated by the chapters in this vol-