关键词: 人际情绪调节, 社会互动, 动态过程, 沟通理论, 过程理论

Abstract: Emotion regulation is of great significance to the maintenance of interpersonal interaction and social relations. In the field of emotion regulation, an amount of researchers usually focus on studies about regulating themselves by themselves, named intrapersonal emotion regulation. Emotion regulation occurs at social interaction in our daily life, as a result, researches about interpersonal emotion regulation (abbrev. IER) are needed to further explored. Comparing with intrapersonal emotion regulation, the dynamic process of IER in the social interaction with others is the dominant feature, which is not investigated yet. To cover this gap, this review summarizes concepts, measurements, theory and empirical findings from the perspective of social interaction, and three key challenges for future research are discussed. Firstly, some researchers proposed different terminology of IER, this study describes the precise definition of IER in order to clear out the initial characteristic, which is dynamic. Secondly, this study introduced the measures of evaluating the dynamic of IER, which included the explicit self-reports, laboratory-based experiments and dynamic assessment methods. Amounts of self-reported questionnaires were developed into explore the strategies of interaction with others, but those could not revealed the dynamic of IER. As a result, some researches tried to conduct “aggression computer game” and “ emotion regulation choose paradigm ” and so on as innovation tools to explore the dynamic process of interpersonal emotion regulation in laboratory. Ecological momentary assessment, daily diary, video-recall conservation and observation as methods to explore dynamic process of IER in natural environment. And the advantages and disadvantages of these methods were comparatively discussed in this work. Thirdly, two theoretical orientations about interpersonal emotion regulation, namely the social regulation cycle model and interpersonal emotion regulation model were discussed. In the social regulation cycle model, previous works have been summarized, which introduced regulate others’ emotion to the field of social interaction. From the social regulation cycle model’s point of view, the researchers have studied the response features of emotion experiencer and regulator from the perspective of interpersonal emotion regulation process, which is how to regulate others’ emotion. The interpersonal emotion regulation communication model describes interactive process from emotion experience and partner. This model provides fundamental theory for interpersonal emotion regulation. Finally, future research can further explore culture as a important factor interaction with interpersonal emotion regulation, in particular, develop a Chinese version because of cultural difference. Although “state-space grid” captures the dynamic process involved in IER. However, there is a dearth of paradigms aim at describing dynamic process of IER. Innovative paradigms are required to adequately capture these complex processes in the future. In addition, researches about neural base of interpersonal emotion regulation are not enough, of importance, although much of the work to date has focused on self-report and laboratory of interpersonal emotion regulation, there is a dearth of research on the neural base used to describing the dynamic connection when regulated from others or interaction with others. Therefore, the future study is needed to examine the processes and neural base by which individuals seek out regulation from others.

Key words: interpersonal emotion regulation, social regulation cycle, individual difference, context, dynamic process