Bridging supportive communication and interpersonal emotion regulation: An integrative review

Social interactions that support people who are experiencing negative emotions are ubiquitous in a wide array of interpersonal relationships. These social interactions are referred to as supportive communication . Decades ago, Burleson and Goldsmith (1998) first noted a connection between supportive communication and emotion regulation, with the goal of explaining the underlying mechanisms by which supportive messages change the recipient’s negative emotions. Since then, contemporary emotion regulation theory has matured, and now can explain a broad range of supportive communication processes via the expansion of interpersonal emotion regulation research and the development of the process model of emotion regulation. This paper aims to describe how contemporary advances in emotion regulation theory and research can shed light on dynamic processes in supportive communication. We then discuss the implications of this updated view for both research fields and show how it can advance interdisciplinary research.