The Governed Heart: Institutional Emotion Regulation through Policy, Proclamation, and Proxy

Governments, schools, hospitals, companies, and myriad other organizations structure institutional life and mobilize large numbers of people to accomplish what they cannot do alone. Institutions also regulate something less visible, but equally consequential: the emotions of their constituents. We introduce institutional emotion regulation as the formal processes by which institutions, through organizations, seek to influence the emotions people have, when they have them, and how they experience and express these emotions. Research across the social sciences has examined how particular organizations attempt to shape affective experiences, but these literatures have largely developed in disciplinary silos or domain-specific settings. We propose that these phenomena reflect a distinct level of emotion regulation, characterized by emotion goals held by organizations and pursued through formal institutional means. We develop a framework that crosses four established stages of emotion regulation – targeting situations, attention, appraisals, and responses – with three distinctive vectors of institutional influence: policies, the rules and structures that shape people’s environments; proclamations, communications directed toward the public; and proxies, the agents who act on behalf of the organization. Our framework provides a common language for understanding how institutions influence emotional life at scale and suggests novel directions for psychological study while surfacing broader questions for society around the appropriate use of this influence.