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Emotional flexibility beats one strategy
Variability over one strategy
Early work on emotion regulation centered on a few basic mechanisms, like suppression, reappraisal, and acceptance. The big topics now are variability and flexibility: having many options and varying the response to the context. Heart rate is the comparison. A healthy system has a big range of heart rates, and the most adaptive emotional life has a big range of emotions too.
Regulating each other
Regulation is also interpersonal. Any parent knows it: people pick up on other people's emotions, influence them, and regulate them in a two-way exchange, often automatically. In some situations the most adaptive move is to get deeply involved and empathic, and in others to take over.
Granularity and choice
Flexibility depends on emotional granularity, the ability to tell emotions apart at a fine grain, a topic Lisa Feldman Barrett pioneered decades ago. With that awareness and a metacognitive step back, a person sees the full spectrum of things they could do, weighs the context, and picks the most adaptive path out of many.
Why does heart rate variability matter?
Heart rate variability reflects the push and pull between the sympathetic and parasympathetic arms of the nervous system as they adjust the heart from beat to beat. A rigid heart rate suggests that the system has lost range. In a landmark 1987 study in the American Journal of Cardiology, Robert Kleiger and colleagues found that reduced variability after a heart attack predicted a higher risk of death. Medicine has treated the range as a marker of a flexible system ever since.
How do people differ in regulating emotions?
Psychologist James Gross at Stanford has studied two common strategies, reappraisal and suppression. Reappraisal means changing how a situation is interpreted before the emotion fully forms, and suppression means holding back the outward signs once the emotion is felt. In a 2003 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Gross and Oliver John found that people who habitually reappraise report more positive emotion and closer relationships. Habitual suppressors reported less positive emotion and less closeness to others.
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