Source
Gross (1998), LIT-554 (Review of General Psychology 2(3), from p. 271), read in full in NOTE-429, pp. 271–288, through the conclusions. The experiments it cites (Gross 1998 JPSP; Gross and Levenson 1993, 1997) were not read and are taken as the review states them.
What was actually shown
The definition (p. 275). “Emotion regulation refers to the processes by which individuals influence which emotions they have, when they have them, and how they experience and express these emotions.” It covers increase and decrease, positive and negative emotion, conscious and automatic processes, and only one’s own emotions. It makes no assumption that regulation is good or bad.
Its place (p. 276, Fig. 2). Affect regulation is the superordinate category, over coping, emotion regulation, mood regulation and defense.
The process model (pp. 281–285, Fig. 4). Emotion is taken as a sequence: situation, attention, meaning, response tendencies, response. Regulatory acts are sorted by where they act: situation selection, situation modification, attentional deployment, cognitive change (reappraisal included) and response modulation (suppression of expression included). The first four are antecedent-focused, the last response-focused (p. 282).
The cited contrast (p. 285). Reappraisal of negative films lowered negative experience. Suppression lowered reported experience of some emotions (pride, amusement) but not others (disgust, sadness), and raised sympathetic responding. Rumination prolongs depressive symptoms and worry prolongs anxiety (p. 284).
What could have come out otherwise. Strategies acting at different points could have had the same effects. In the cited studies they did not. The classification itself could not have come out otherwise; it is a taxonomy, offered as “working distinctions”.
What this does not say
- That regulation can be measured apart from generation. The paper’s first open challenge (pp. 285–286): inferring regulation needs a counterfactual unregulated response, so “thresholds for inferring emotion regulation should be high”. It names Frijda as holding that regulation is “part and parcel of emotion” and sets that view aside without refuting it.
- That the families differ in mechanism. The model is “silent” on mechanisms, relations among strategies and their relative efficacy (p. 283). The boundaries are permeable, as the paper concedes.
- That reappraisal is better in general. The evidence in 1998 was a few laboratory film studies, and for disgust films physiology did not always fall under reappraisal (p. 285).
- That dysregulation figures in over half of Axis I disorders. The figure is asserted with three citations and no count (C5, weak).
- That emotions have a true unregulated course. The model assumes one, and the paper admits it is hard to know (p. 286).
Connections
- Rival. THEORY-056 (Frijda, Ridderinkhof and Rietveld; Barrett) takes the side Gross set aside: most regulation is one motive state checking another, with no distinct regulating system. Both accounts predict the reappraisal and suppression contrast, so it cannot decide between them.
- Psychological inflexibility (THEORY-050) treats experiential avoidance, close to situation selection and suppression here, as a transdiagnostic process. Rumination, worry, avoidance and suppression appear in this review as regulation strategies with costs.
- The appraisal account of emotion that the review’s consensual model distils is THEORY-055.
Note of 2026-10-29: what holds it back
Kept Proposed by the sixteenth status review. NOTE-429 read the review in full, but it reports no data. No study in the record estimates each person’s unregulated response independently and compares strategies grouped by stage on matched emotions and measures. The one cited contrast, reappraisal against suppression, is also predicted by the rival THEORY-056, and NOTE-1067 reads that dissociation as an artefact. Nothing live rests on it: ARG-018 is Rejected.