We're not alone: Understanding the social consequences of intrinsic emotion regulation

Recently, there has been a push for taking a more interpersonal approach to emotion regulation. However, most work continues to look at regulators in isolation and focus on strategies that do not involve others. Our objective is to highlight the interpersonal nature of emotion regulation by providing a targeted review of its social consequences, including effects on the regulator and their interaction partners. For illustrative purposes, we focus on one commonly used strategy that has received particular attention in this area, namely, expressive suppression. We briefly review existing research on social consequences of suppression and then delineate underlying mechanisms and potential boundary conditions. Finally, we provide recommendations for expanding this area of research, including (a) incorporating a more diverse set of strategies, especially interpersonal ones; (b) examining a wider range of relationship contexts and levels of analysis; and (c) evaluating emotion regulation as a dynamic, shared phenomenon. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).