ORIGINS AND DESTINATIONS, DISTANCES AND DIRECTIONS: ACCOUNTING FOR THE JOURNEY IN THE EMOTION REGULATION PROCESS

The literatures on emotion regulation and emotional labor have generated a considerable amount of knowledge on the relative effectiveness of how people regulate their emotional displays when their feelings are misaligned. By comparison, it has ignored the importance of what emotions individuals were feeling prior to the emotion regulation attempt vis-a-vis the emotions they made an effort to display. The consideration of individuals’ emotional origins and destinations during an emotion regulation episode leads to the key tenet that both distance and direction are essential concepts that must be integrated into theory and research on emotion regulation. Accordingly, we reconceptualize emotion regulation as a journey involving the joint interplay of distance, direction, and method of travel. Drawing from the circumplex model of affect, we introduce the concepts of “emotional distance” and “emotional direction” to map the discrepancies between the emotion an individual currently feels and the emotion that in...