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The term ” soft skills ” is on everyone’s lips these days. It’s so ubiquitous that it’s being thrown around all over the place. Every “fashion” effect has its detractors: a term is reduced to an understandable simplicity, losing its original content. Today, we hear statements like “soft skills are knowing how to say hello and thank you”, “soft skills are being kind”, or “to develop your soft skills, you need to meditate every day”. These are easy shortcuts. And above all, they’re wrong.
It’s important to go back to the source of soft skills, which at Open Mind we call psycho-social and emotional competencies (PSEC – a term developed in 1993 by the World Health Organization).
At Open Mind, we have carried out over 1,500 cognitive and emotional assessments with French executives and managers. Our experience has enabled us to put into words the cognitive and emotional issues they encounter on a daily basis, and what skills they have or need to develop to deal with them.
We’d like to introduce you to a series of articles on “soft-skills”, the psychosocial and emotional skills we believe will be the skills of the future.
Today, the CPS in the spotlight is…emotional regulation!
So it’s true that in today’s soft skills articles, you’ll find much sexier terms like “Positive Mindset” or “Self Marketing”. But since we’re all for a no-fuss approach, let’s call a spade a spade.
What is emotional regulation?
Emotions are at the heart of it all. Emotions are real clues to understanding a situation and ourselves. They direct our attention to certain elements in the environment, help us to make decisions, give substance to our sensory perceptions, help us to develop our social relationships or even anchor a memory more strongly. But these emotions can also handicap us, particularly when, in the face of a given situation, they are unjustified, of the wrong intensity or duration.
Hence the need to be able to influence what emotions we have, when we have them and how we feel and express them. This is what we call emotional regulation. Through a complex psychological process, the individual can trigger, inhibit, maintain or modulate his or her affects (feelings, memories, heart rate, laughter…).
Emotion regulation involves having control over several things:
- The way we feel our emotions
- How our body feels after a stressful event
- Our behavior (actions or facial expressions)
- How we think about, analyze and judge our emotional and behavioral reactions
There are cognitive strategies for regulating emotions. According to Gross (2001), there are two main strategies for regulating emotions. The first is “expressive suppression”, which focuses on the consequences of the response. It consists in inhibiting the behavioral expression of an emotion without, however, reducing negative feelings or increasing positive ones. The second strategy is “cognitive reappraisal”, which focuses on the antecedents of the response. This strategy involves changing the way in which the situation is perceived in order to modify its emotional meaning and avoid the appearance of undesirable emotions.
Emotional regulation is therefore a process of controlling emotions, keeping them in balance and away from extremes.
Why is it important to know how to regulate your emotions?
Knowing how to regulate your emotions doesn’t mean losing spontaneity. It’s only by looking at the opposite of good emotion regulation that we realize why it’s important.
Explosive or impulsive emotions, overly inhibited or controlled emotions, avoidance of situations that provoke strong emotions, or when these become a permanent state, are all signs of poor emotional regulation.
Emotions then become a daily handicap, impacting on well-being, work and social life. For example, people with emotion dysregulation react strongly and excessively to mildly negative events. Behavioral manifestations of poor emotional regulation include crying, shouting, accusing, self-blaming and passive-aggressive behavior, which can complicate relationships and generate conflict.
Where does emotional regulation take place in the brain?
Within the cerebral cortex, emotions are highly complex phenomena that do not involve just one part of the brain.
The areas involved in emotions are partly grouped together in what is known as the limbic system, which lies towards the base of the brain. This limbic system is home to three key parts of the emotional system. Firstly, the amygdala, which assesses the emotional content of a stimulus. It is, among other things, the center of fear. The hypothalamus, which is responsible for regulating how you respond to that emotion. For example, when you’re euphoric, it’s the hypothalamus that makes your heart beat faster, your blood pressure rise or your respiratory rate increase. And finally, the hippocampus, which transforms short-term memory into long-term memory and retrieves stored memories as well as the sensory information associated with them. Your memories will guide your emotional response.
In terms of regulation, it’s the prefrontal cortex, which appeared later in evolution, that controls and inhibits emotions. It was the story of Phineas Gage at the beginning of the 19th century that enabled us to discover the role of the prefrontal cortex. A railroad worker, Gage survived an explosion in which an iron bar pierced his skull, and more precisely his prefrontal cortex. He survived and recovered within 2 months. While Phineas Gage had retained all his cognitive functions, his character had been impacted: vulgar language, impulsiveness, moodiness, temper tantrums… A lesion in the prefrontal cortex seemed to have affected his mood, behavior and emotional management.
Within this prefrontal cortex, two areas are particularly involved in emotion regulation: the orbitofrontal cortex, the seat of our social behavior, and the anterior cingulate cortex.
The orbitofrontal cortex enables us to suppress certain emotions. For example, when a person suffers from depression, we can observe a drop in activity in this area: in effect, they have difficulty inhibiting negative emotions. When a person has poor emotion regulation, scientists at the Karolinska Institute have observed that they have a smaller-than-average orbitofrontal cortex. The greater their difficulties with emotions, the smaller the area.
The anterior cingulate cortex is involved in affective self-regulation, enabling us to adapt our reactions to stressful situations.
Tips for developing emotional regulation
1/ Identify and name the emotion you’re feeling. If you have difficulty doing this, listen to your bodily sensations (breathing, heartbeat speed…). Awareness of bodily sensations is often the first step in the process of feeling the emotion in order to identify it.
2/ One possible emotional regulation strategy is Positive Refocusing. This involves thinking of pleasant things that have nothing to do with the current situation, such as a memory that awakens strong positive emotions.
Author: Anaïs Roux
