The use and change of emotion regulation strategies: The promoting effect of cognitive flexibility

Abstract

Being flexible to the environment is of great significance to the individual’s successful social life, the improvement of subjective well-being and the maintenance of physical and mental health. Cognitive flexibility deficits and mood disorders are generally considered to be typical characteristics of depression, anxiety and other mental disorders. Although cognitive flexibility as an important component of executive function has been shown to play an important role in the process of emotional regulation, it is not yet clear that how cognitive flexibility contributes to different aspects of emotional regulation and the mechanisms of its influence. Based on existing theories and empirical studies, we systematically elaborated the promoting effect of cognitive flexibility on emotional regulation and analyzed its influencing mechanism from four aspects of emotional regulation tendency, effectiveness, flexibility and adaptiveness. The emotional cognitive control model and the cognitive control framework emotional regulation flexibility provide the theoretical basis of cognitive flexibility promoting emotional regulation. The former emphasizes that cognitive flexibility play a role in the use of emotional regulation strategies, while the latter emphasizes that cognitive flexibility also have an impact on the change of emotional regulation strategies. On the one hand, cognitive flexibility plays an important role by promoting individuals tend to use protective regulation strategies and effectively alleviate emotional responses during using emotional regulation strategies. On the other hand, cognitive flexibility also plays a promoting role by helping individuals to respond rapidly to situational changes and reducing cognitive load in multi-objective tradeoffs during goal pursuit behaviors. Specifically, (1) emotional regulation strategies that play a protective role in physical and mental health may benefit from cognitive flexibility, which promotes individuals’ tendency to use cognitive reappraisal; (2) cognitive flexibility may promote the effectiveness of emotional regulation either indirectly (enhancing the effect of emotion regulation strategies) or directly (decreasing the intensity of emotional responses); (3) in the process of adjusting emotion regulation strategies according to the situation, cognitive flexibility can promote individuals to make a rapid response to the changing situation that may be a necessary condition for emotional regulation flexibility; (4) cognitive flexibility can reduce cognitive load in multiple goal pursuit behaviors by flexibly balancing multiple personal goals, which promote emotion regulation adaptiveness. Additionally, we speculated that cognitive flexibility is most closely related to emotion regulation adaptiveness because the three aspects of emotion regulation: tendency, effectiveness, and flexibility are important prerequisites for adaptiveness. In summary, cognitive flexibility plays a promoting role in the use and change of emotional regulation strategies. Both cognitive flexibility and emotional regulation play an important role in individual mental health. Clarifying the promoting effect of cognitive flexibility on different aspects of emotional regulation can help us further understand the internal mechanism of cognitive deficits in mood disorders and provide important reference for the combination and improvement of cognitive flexibility with cognitive therapy related to depression, anxiety and other mental disorders.