On the rationality of emotion regulation
Abstract
Much of the recent work in psychology (and affective science) has shown that humans regulate their emotions nearly constantly, sometimes well and sometimes poorly. I argue that properly regulating one’s emotions displays emotional rationality, and failing to do so displays emotional irrationality. If an agent feels an emotion that is obviously problematic for the agent to feel and she is aware that it is problematic, then the agent ought to regulate her emotions in future similar situations. To capture this aspect of emotional rationality, I introduce the concept of imprudence, which is meant to capture a familiar way that we assess each other’s emotions, despite the fact that it has yet to be a factor in the literature on emotions in philosophy, psychology, or affective science.
Citation
Duncan Kerr , A 2021 , ' On the rationality of emotion regulation ' , Philosophical Psychology , vol. 34 , no. 4 , pp. 453-473 . https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2021.1915969
Publication
Philosophical Psychology
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0951-5089Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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