From Appraisal to Regulation

Return to the example of being asked to lecture by your professor. Even if you do not enjoy speaking in public, you probably could manage to do it. You would purposefully control your emotions, which would allow you to speak, but we constantly regulate our emotions, and much of our emotion regulation occurs without us actively thinking about it.

automatic emotional regulation

Automatic emotional regulation (AER) refers to the process by which an individual’s emotional response to a stimulus is automatically regulated by the brain without conscious effort or control. AER is an automatic process that works like a script or schema — once you develop the process, you just do it without thinking about it. AER can be adaptive or maladaptive and has important health implications (Hopp, Troy, & Mauss, 2011). Adaptive AER leads to better health outcomes than maladaptive AER, primarily due to experiencing or mitigating stressors better than people with maladaptive AERs. Strategies can reduce negative emotions, which in turn should increase psychological health (Hopp, Troy, & Mauss, 2011).

Emotions as Meaning-Making

Earlier in the module, you learned that emotions involve physiological arousal, appraisal, and subjective experience. Some modern theorists take that idea further by arguing that emotions depend heavily on how the brain interprets bodily sensations in context.

Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett argues that emotions are not “built-in packages” you’re born with. Instead, the brain constructs emotions using past experience and concepts—essentially making predictions about what bodily sensations mean in a specific situation.

In her constructivist view, emotions function like mental predictions: your brain uses what it has learned before to interpret what’s happening now and decide what to do next. As Barrett explains, the brain uses past experience, organized as concepts, to give sensations meaning—and when the concepts involved are emotion concepts, the brain constructs instances of emotion (Barrett, 2017).

Same body, different emotion

One important implication of this view is that the same physiological state can lead to different emotions depending on context.

For example:

• A churning stomach while waiting in line at a bakery might be interpreted as hunger.
• A churning stomach while waiting for medical test results might be interpreted as worry.

So rather than emotions being purely automatic reactions that “take over,” the brain plays an active role in shaping emotional experience based on prediction and interpretation.

Other Views on Emotion

Two other influential perspectives help clarify an ongoing debate: Do emotions require conscious thinking?

Zajonc: Emotion can occur without deliberate thought

Robert Zajonc argued that some emotions occur separately from, or prior to, conscious cognitive interpretation. For instance, you may feel fear in response to an unexpected loud sound before you fully process what caused it (Zajonc, 1998). He also proposed that people sometimes experience rapid, intuitive likes or dislikes—what we often call a gut feeling (Zajonc, 1980).

LeDoux: The brain has fast and slow pathways for fear

Joseph LeDoux’s research also suggests that some emotional reactions—especially fear—can occur with minimal conscious thought. He described two routes for processing potential threats:

• A fast pathway from the thalamus directly to the amygdala (quick, rough information)
• A slower pathway from the thalamus to the cortex and then to the amygdala (more detailed processing)

This helps explain why you might jump in fear before realizing the “threat” is harmless (Cunha, Monfils, & LeDoux, 2010; LeDoux, 1996, 2002).

Emotional Expression and Emotion Regulation

Emotion regulation describes how people influence their emotional experiences and expressions—how emotions start, how intense they become, how long they last, and whether they are expressed outwardly.

Researchers sometimes group strategies into:

• Covert strategies, which happen internally (e.g., shifting attention, reframing a situation)
• Overt strategies, which involve actions or other people (e.g., seeking reassurance, leaving the situation, using alcohol)

Aldao and Dixon-Gordon (2014) examined emotion regulation patterns in undergraduate students and found that some overt regulation strategies were stronger predictors of psychological symptoms than covert strategies. This doesn’t mean overt strategies are always harmful—it means that certain behavioral ways of coping (especially avoidant or risky behaviors) may be more closely tied to distress.

For example, researchers have explored “pregaming” (drinking heavily before a social event) as a possible emotion regulation behavior. Findings suggest a relationship between alcohol use and emotion regulation difficulties, though the link is complex and likely depends on context and individual differences (Pederson, 2016).

Overall, psychologists distinguish between:

• Adaptive regulation that supports coping and well-being, and
• Maladaptive regulation that may reduce distress in the short term but increase problems over time.