Extending psychoradiology of emotion regulation from mental health to adaptiveness promotion

Emotion regulation (ER) research has, for decades, focused on mental health outcomes, such as emotional recovery and wellbeing reinstatement, in behavioral, physiological, and neural measures across different regulatory strategies. Although important, the practical significance of ER research should not only be limited to mental health, but also needs to consider aiding people's real-time adaptive behavior, to meet varying environmental demands or goals flexibly. In this paper, we propose an idea of ER adaptiveness that pays equal attention to both mental health outcomes, and how an ER strategy may be used to facilitate functional adaptiveness in meeting distinct goals. For instance, research of ER adaptiveness needs to highlight how to design regulatory strategies for the purpose of promoting cognitive, behavior, or social functions (nonaffective goal) in addition to that of affective wellbeing, and how to help a learned strategy work flexibly in changing contexts (affective goal). Lastly, taking application in sport psychology for example, we propose potential directions of how ER adaptiveness research may help participants to improve motor performance in competitive sports.