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, scholars have 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 individual attempts to display via emotion regulation. We describe how emotional distance and emotional direction augment constructs and theories relevant to emotion regulation, and we explain how the combined consideration of distance, direction, and method of travel is necessary to fully understand the intrapersonal consequences of regulating emotion.