Mechanisms of social emotion regulation: from neuroscience to psychotherapy

The term Emotion Regulation refers to the neurocognitive mechanisms by which we regulate the onset, strength, and the eventual expression of our emotions. An important distinction to be considered is between Individual Emotion Regulation (IER), or the regulation of basic emotions within the self without the intervention of others, Socially cued Emotion Regulation (SER) or the regulation of emotions elicited by the interactions with others, and the emerging topic of how we regulate others‘ emotions or Interpersonal emotion regulation (I-PER). Although the mechanisms of the regulation of IER have received much attention, to date there is little evidence on the psychological and neural mechanisms behind the regulation of emotions in response to social interactions (SER), and how we interpersonally regulate others‘ emotions (I-PER). The aim of this chapter is to present recent advances in the emerging field of social emotion regulation (SER) and interpersonal emotion regulation (I-PER), main mechanisms, their neural bases, and implications for psychopathology and psychotherapy. Indeed, deficits in the regulation of emotions has been linked to severe psychiatric disorders, with patients showing heightened or suppressed emotional experience in reaction to others. Understanding how patients experience and fail to regulate such social emotions is of fundamental importance. We will discuss the implications of regulating emotions for the treatment of psychiatric disorders, proposing a new framework of emotion regulation based on experiential and dynamic principles. After the presentation of the model, a range of cognitive-behavioral (mainly belonging to IER) and dynamic-experiential techniques (more related with SER and I-PER) for regulating emotions in psychotherapy will be discussed. Finally a methodology of experiential-dynamic emotion regulation will be presented. This model is derived from the experiential-dynamic psychotherapies and holds the promise of facilitating regulatory processes within the clinical setting to guide strategies and techniques that can be incorporated into various models of therapy.