Antecedent focused regulation
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Acting at one of the four points that come before a reaction is fully formed: choosing the situation, changing it, moving your attention, or deciding how you read it. The fifth point, working on the reaction once it is already there, is the response focused one, and it is the most expensive because it is the last. There is no established Greek term for this pair, so the Greek name here is a plain rendering rather than a standard translation.
How to spot it
When something is coming, ask where you are standing in relation to it. Is it still ahead of you, or is it already on your face? Everything still ahead is a point you have not used.
The research behind the term
The term is not our invention. It comes from published research, and what follows is what that research found — our own synthesis of the published abstract, not a translation of the original.
Gross, J. J. (1998). The Emerging Field of Emotion Regulation: An Integrative Review — doi:10.1037/1089-2680.2.3.271
What it found
- Emotion regulation concerns which emotions one has, when one has them, and how one experiences and expresses them.
- It is conceptually distinguished from coping, mood regulation, defense, and affect regulation.
- Emotion can be regulated at five points in the emotion-generative process: situation selection, situation modification, attentional deployment, cognitive change, and response modulation.
How it found it
An integrative review with an evolutionary perspective that defines the field, marks it off from related concepts, and proposes a process model of regulation.
What it means for stress management
The first four of the five strategies act before the emotion is fully established — which is why prevention costs less than holding back the response once it has already broken out.
Practised in
The term does not stay a definition. It appears inside missions where the pattern happens in real time and you have to recognise it as it happens to you.
Overdue Deliverable
The Week That Does Not Close
Sources
Every claim on this page maps to published research. The citations link to the original source.
- Gross, J. J. (1998). The Emerging Field of Emotion Regulation: An Integrative Review — doi:10.1037/1089-2680.2.3.271