## Summary Dr. James Gross is professor of psychology at Stanford University and the founder of modern emotion regulation research. His process model of emotion regulation (first laid out in 1998) reframed the field: regulation is not one skill but a timeline of interventions, earlier ones costing less and working more gently than later ones. His *Handbook of Emotion Regulation* is the field's standard reference. ## The process model Emotion regulation, in Gross's account, happens along the timeline of an emotion, with a choice of intervention at each stage: 1. **Situation selection** — choosing (or leaving) the situations that generate the emotion in the first place. 2. **Situation modification** — changing the situation once in it. 3. **Attentional deployment** — choosing what to attend to within it; distraction and focus live here. 4. **Cognitive change — reappraisal** — changing what the situation *means*; the strategy with the strongest evidence base. 5. **Response modulation — suppression** — clamping down on the expression once the emotion has already fired; the costliest and least effective route. The headline finding of three decades of experiments: **reappraisal beats suppression**. Suppression hides the emotion from others while the body keeps paying its physiological bill, and it impairs memory and connection; reappraisal genuinely changes the emotion's trajectory. The five stages are what [[Feeling Strategies]] works through in detail. ## The appraisal lineage Gross did not start from nothing. The thought behind the process model is one he traces back to antiquity and to one experimental pioneer in particular: > I think from time immemorial, people have appreciated a really important point, which is that it's not actually the world that directly impinges on us. It's the world as mediated by our thought processes. So, most of the time, when we have affective responses, those are the result, not just of our situation, external situation, but by the way that we represent, or interpret, or understand, or evaluate that situation. So, that's an age-old insight. And Dick Lazarus, in the early 1960s, using a stress and coping perspective, did some of the very first experimental work, as you know, where he brought people in, and then he showed them upsetting film clips, and tried to get them to use certain kinds of defensive responses, by which he just met ways of thinking about what they saw. In that pioneering work, he established that you can actually shift some aspects of emotional responding by the way you think. And that's why I thought that this would be the philosophical background and this early empirical work together led me to think, wow, that's got to be an interesting thing to kind of push on further. From *Dealing with Feeling*, the episode on beating negative thoughts, 6 March 2025: [podcast.apple.com](https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/dealing-with-feeling/id1800034984?i=1000698072164&r=493) That is the inheritance in one sentence: the Stoic insight that it is not events but our judgements about events that move us, given a laboratory. Richard Lazarus ([[Richard Lazarus]]) showed it experimentally; Gross spent his career building the taxonomy of what "the way you think" actually consists of. ## On the oldest question He frames the whole enterprise inside a very old problem, and says it plainly: > And the reason I think I had that experience is that I knew from philosophy that this is one of the oldest questions there is in the Western tradition. This question of, are we essentially rational? Are we essentially passionate? Or are we both? And if we're both, how do we deal with the fact that we get moved to act both by what we think and by what we feel? How does that work? And when it doesn't work very well, what do we do? How do we manage this sort of situation where we've got these multiple drivers? It's as though you've got four or five people packed into the front seat trying to drive a car. From *Dealing with Feeling*, the episode on beating negative thoughts, 6 March 2025: [podcast.apple.com](https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/dealing-with-feeling/id1800034984?i=1000698072164&r=493) The four or five drivers in the front seat is his image for what the ancients called the divided soul: reason, passion, and the rest of the household arguing over the wheel. Regulation is not the triumph of one driver but the practice of getting them to drive as a crew. ## A word of caution Lisa Feldman Barrett ([[Lisa Feldman Barrett]], *How Emotions Are Made*) praises the strategies but questions the architecture: hundreds of experiments show the strategies work, she argues, but not why — because "emotion regulation" turns out to be another name for the same processes that construct emotional experience in the first place. The strategies survive the critique; the underlying picture of emotions as pre-built reactions does not. Gross's model was forged in the classical tradition, and remains the most useful map of it. ## Recent work In recent years his focus has widened from the clinic to the culture: emotion regulation in the era of the climate crisis, when the feelings to be regulated are grief, dread and anger about the future rather than private troubles. That thread connects directly to the questions this vault keeps asking about [[Hope as a Practice]] and living with hard knowledge. --- `Related:` [[Feeling Strategies]] · [[Affect]] · [[Richard Lazarus]] · [[Lisa Feldman Barrett]] · [[Hope as a Practice]] `Concepts:` [[Emotions]] · [[Affect]] · [[Reappraisal]] `Knowledge Base:` [[Feeling Strategies]] · [[Richard Lazarus]] · [[Lisa Feldman Barrett]]