Emotion Regulation: Implication for Politics

Despite robust evidence regarding the impact of emotions on public opinion, political behavior, and foreign policy, few studies have directly addressed the strategic use of emotions by politicians, policymakers and other actors. To allow scholars of politics and emotion to assess whether different emotion regulation strategies are associated with different political outcomes, what is needed is a framework for organizing the large number of strategies that politicians and policymakers use to influence people’s emotions. One such framework is Gross’s (2014) process model of emotion regulation, which previously has been used primarily to examine psychological processes at the individual level in healthy and clinical populations. According to the process model, each stage in the emotion-generative process is a potential target for emotion regulation. We show how this framework facilitates an analysis of whether different emotion regulation strategies and implementation tactics have different consequences for political behavior, both immediately and over the long term. We also provide guidance on productive directions for future research within each domain of the process model.