Rachael N. Volokhov, Heath A. Demaree
The ability to regulate one's  emotions is an integral part of human social behavior. One antecedent emotion  regulation strategy, known as reappraisal, is characterized by cognitively  evaluating an emotional stimulus to alter its emotional impact and one  response-focused strategy, suppression, is aimed at reducing behavioral output.  People are capable of using these specific emotion regulation strategies when  instructed to do so; however, it is equally important to investigate natural and  self-selected strategy
use. This study was designed to determine to what  extent people spontaneously regulate their emotions and the emotion regulation  strategies they choose to achieve their regulatory goals. Participants were  given no instructions to regulate their emotions before they were shown a  negative and a positive film clip, but were instead asked afterwards about the  specific strategies that they had used. Participants reported regulating their  emotions more to the negative film than to the positive film. Reappraisal was  more frequently selected as an emotion regulation strategy than suppression. As  expected, participants with high baseline respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA)  adopted reappraisal strategies more than those with low RSA but, surprisingly,  RSA was not associated with facial expressivity. Suggestions for future research  in this relatively young field of spontaneous emotion regulation are  offered.