Interpersonal Emotional Regulation in a Digital World

Helping people regulate their emotions appropriately is important for promoting positive mental health and well-being. Indeed, a key focus of psychotherapy, as well as everyday social relationships, is helping individuals to recognise and deal with their welling emotions. Traditional therapies and lay approaches often attempt either to reason the emotion away or to promote acceptance of the feeling while the person gets on with something more important to them. In either case, two things are implicit: the emotion, as it is experienced, is regarded as something problematic to be dealt with; and this is a job for the individual to manage.

It may be that neither of these premises is correct: emotions are not, in themselves, the problem; and the individual is not always the best locus of emotional control. As a result, understanding how to facilitate interpersonal emotional regulation is increasingly important to promoting good psychological health. However, given the abundance of time spent talking on social media, a question remains over whether this form of communication can help with interpersonal emotional regulation.

Once other factors are recognised as helpful in regulating a person’s emotions, then an important facet in affect modulation becomes developing appropriate expression and communication of emotions. Clear emotional communication allows what one person feels to be understood by another. That second person can then be recruited, as a sort of external frontal lobe, to add a further source of regulation for the emotions of the first person.

If such an approach is taken to emotional regulation, then the existence of the emotion is not the problem; the issue is how to communicate the experience of the emotion to others so as not to scare them off, and to allow their recruitment in the regulation of the otherwise overwhelming emotion. There is a lot to unpack in those few sentences, such as the true relationship between emotions (which are often thought of as internal feelings), and their outward manifestations in behaviour and words (which are often thought of as expressions or communications). This may not be a precisely accurate conceptualisation, but the latter aspects of transmission to others are important.

Some find interpersonal emotional communication more difficult than others. This is a complex business, relying on more than verbal communication (visual aspects may be cut off by some digital platforms). It may not be that the person has difficulty recognising emotions, but rather lacks full access to all the important cues, or lacks the communicative techniques to transmit information about their emotions. In this case, it is not the emotion that is the issue, but rather the ability to communicate it. Not being able to communicate places them at a disadvantage in terms of opportunities to engage in interpersonal emotional regulation, and, as a result, they can display emotions in ways that look inappropriate to others.

Given these considerations, several questions are raised in the context of the use of social media and digital communication platforms. To what extent can digital communication help people discuss and regulate their emotions? To what extent can digital communication help engage interpersonal emotional regulation? If it does not help, or if it retards, the ability to transmit clearly about feelings and emotions, does that make digital communication akin to trying to navigate emotions without the appropriate language, disadvantaging possibilities of control over those feelings? If that is the case, then is it any wonder that, given emotional regulation is important to mental well-being, and adequate communication about emotions is important to their regulation, high levels of digital use are detrimental to mental health?

There are many online and social media groups set up to allow full and frank discussion of how people feel about many mental health and well-being issues. The level of engagement in these groups certainly suggests that quite a lot of people find something about their usage reinforcing. However, even leaving aside the much-debated issue of whether engagement in such social media groups makes mental health worse, there is precious little evidence that such digitally mediated groups have any positive impact on emotional and mental well-being. The reason may be found in the ways in which communication is set up to occur in the digital world.

Most digital communications between people are relatively short, if not always sweet. Short communications may be adequate to allow transmission of the presence of an emotion. It is relatively easy to transmit happiness or anger or disgust via social media. Indeed, many people seem to spend their digital lives doing just that, and there are many emojis created to help. However, it is far from clear that, beyond transmitting the existence of some or other raging emotion, short and often terse communications are any good at communicating the subtleties of the emotional experience. Even the presence of a cartoon may not help that much with nuances necessary in interpersonal emotional understanding.

In fact, the immediate impact of many digital communications is to transplant the emotion, more or less directly, into the recipient. How many times have you received an angry-sounding digital communication and felt angry? The impact of such direct transmission, or contagion, of emotion, is not to evoke understanding or empathy for the other. Such direct transmission of the feeling may, at best, evoke sympathy for the sender. More often, it can be frightening for the recipient, and/or lead to disengagement from the discussion. Such disengagement may be especially likely if the emotion expressed is negative—ironically, exactly the sort of emotion that benefits from interpersonal regulation. The development of emotional empathy—understanding the emotion as felt by the other, and why—in a way that can lead to the elicitation of help, often requires much longer and more subtle communication than is afforded by most unmonitored digital platforms.

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If the nature of digital communication is not typically well suited to the transmission of emotions in a way that is acceptable to others, then those others cannot easily be recruited to help with the control of that emotion through those digital means. This may well limit the degree to which interpersonal emotional regulation, of a sort now considered helpful, occurs digitally. Of course, it may be possible to modify the ways in which digital communications are constructed—to put more time and thought into their expression. Clearly, this kind of emotional communication can happen in online textual therapies. Nevertheless, everyday digital communication, of the sort commonly occurring on social media platforms, could well be disadvantaging those who engage in it in terms of their emotional regulation strategies.