ABSTRACT
To a self-regulation researcher, one of the intriguing facts about emotion is its relative immunity to direct self-regulation. To be sure, people have many strategies, procedures, habits, and other practices with which they try to alter or prolong their emotional states (see Gross, 2006, for a review), and some of them are reportedly somewhat effective. Still, people cannot control their emotions as easily or directly as they can control their behaviors or some of their thoughts. The very multiplicity of emotion regulation strategies stems in part from the fact that, in general, none of them works all that well and there is no one strategy that can be relied upon to produce the desired emotional state whenever needed. Moreover, almost all the emotion regulation strategies are indirect, in the sense that they operate by changing something else (e.g., what one is thinking or one’s level of bodily arousal), which may then in turn alter emotion. Direct control over emotions—as in simply deciding to stop feeling guilty and, perhaps with a small exertion of willpower, succeeding at not feeling guilty any more after that—is apparently outside the realm of normal human experience.
