emotion regulation
Definition
Emotion regulation refers to the strategies individuals use to influence which emotions they have, when they have them, and how these emotions are experienced and expressed. Within the context of adolescent political psychology, two strategies receive particular attention: cognitive reappraisal, which operates by changing how individuals interpret emotion-eliciting situations, and expressive suppression, which modulates behavioural responses without altering the underlying emotional experience or its interpretation. These strategies are theorised to function at different stages of the emotion-generative process and therefore carry different consequences for how anxiety about the future is cognitively processed. Among UK adolescents aged 16 to 21, cognitive reappraisal moderated the association between future anxiety and support for democratic and authoritarian principles, whereas expressive suppression was not expected to substantially alter these associations. Adolescents high in cognitive reappraisal showed a weaker positive link between future anxiety and democratic support, and the typically positive association with authoritarianism found among low reappraisers reversed direction for those scoring high on the strategy.
Sources: Borghi et al. (2025)
Related Terms
- adolescence (1 shared article)
- future anxiety (1 shared article)
- political attitudes (1 shared article)
- ideology (1 shared article)
Applications
Emotion Regulation and Future Anxiety
Future anxiety, characterised by feelings of pessimism and uncertainty about what lies ahead, is not experienced uniformly across adolescents; individual differences in emotion regulation strategies shape how that anxiety is processed and what political consequences follow. Cognitive reappraisal can re-frame the causes of future anxiety in a more optimistic way, potentially functioning as a coping mechanism that weakens the anxiety-to-political-attitude pathway. Expressive suppression, by contrast, leaves the underlying emotional experience intact and was therefore expected to leave associations between future anxiety and political attitudes largely unchanged.
Sources: Borghi et al. (2025)
Emotion Regulation and Political Attitudes
Emotion regulation strategies moderate the extent to which future anxiety translates into specific political orientations among young people. For adolescents low in cognitive reappraisal, future anxiety was associated with greater support for authoritarianism, while those high in cognitive reappraisal showed the opposite pattern.
Sources: Borghi et al. (2025)
