ABSTRACT
Sad David found out that his wife fell in love with someone else and ever since he has been smoking one cigarette after another. Stressed Paul masks his worries by downing beers until he is drunk. Toddler Iris is crying and her frustrated mother comforts her by giving her a cookie. Unhappy Anna is penniless but buys an unneeded pair of shoes to feel better. Sexually aroused Sander ends up having unprotected sex with his new date because he was too aroused to be bothered to take precaution. These examples compellingly illustrate that people in their daily lives are commonly confronted with situations where poor self-control and emotion regulation go hand in hand. The goal of this chapter is to provide a broad overview of the interaction between emotion regulation and self-control, and the implications of this interaction for health behavior and wellbeing. As will be shown in the remainder of the chapter, some forms of emotion regulation are highly effective and result in rather successful self-regulation. Other forms of emotion regulation are, however, doomed to fail at the expense of successful self-regulation. On the contrary, self-regulation may also affect emotion regulation. Before going into detail, this chapter will first provide a short introduction on what constitutes self-regulation and self-control. Next, it discusses why emotions trigger emotion regulation and what emotion regulation represents. Subsequently, it will describe how the domains of self-regulation, and more specifically self-control and emotion regulation, relate to each other within the topic of health behavior and wellbeing. The final part of this chapter serves as a paradigm case of how emotion regulation can impact the health-related behavior of eating.
