Immersed or Detached? Reappraisal of Situated Emotional Events

We often tell ourselves to control our emotions, to remain cool and detached. But what does this mean? One form of emotion regulation is reappraisal, the cognitive change of the meaning of a situation in order to alter its emotional impact. Reappraisal strategies make us feel more or less connected to what is going on: if immersion lets us to the mercy of emotional reactions wrapped up by the situation, detachment makes us not react to or not care about what would seem to be a high-impact event. The book focused on down-regulation of negative emotions: after briefly reviewing major research in this area, it presents three experimental studies considering both stable individual strategies of coping and emotion regulation and reappraisal short-term effects on the physiological, behavioural and experiential response systems. The analysis should help shed more light on the emotion regulation process, in particular questioning on the role of the type of situational context in which an emotional event is embedded. It should be useful to professionals in the emotion field, or anyone who may be considering investigating this fascinating process.