Getting Better Over Time: A Framework for Examining the Impact of Emotion Regulation Training

Effective emotion regulation is indispensable for mental and physical health. Recent decades have seen exponential growth in research into the psychological mechanisms underlying emotion regulation. Much of the foundational research investigating emotion regulation processes has assessed changes in emotion during single laboratory-based sessions. One relatively underexplored topic is the assessment of whether and how the ability to regulate emotion effectively using particular strategies can change over time within an individual (e.g., through training). The goal of this review is to examine existing research into this topic in healthy as well as clinical populations. I will provide a framework for the design of future longitudinal emotion regulation intervention studies that may further address this topic, with factors including the strategy or strategies trained; situation factors including the number, frequency, and delivery modality of intervention sessions as well as the ecological validity of the stimuli experienced at each time point; and person factors including training recipient individual differences, within and across healthy and clinical populations. Thorough, theoretically motivated examination of these factors will be important in the development of novel, evidence-based, and increasingly personalized longitudinal interventions to improve emotion regulation efficacy.