Helping people regulate their emotions appropriately is important for promoting positive mental health and well-being. Indeed, a key focus of psychotherapy, as well as everyday social relationships, is helping individuals to recognise and deal with their welling emotions. Traditional therapies and lay approaches often attempt either to reason the emotion away or to promote acceptance of the feeling while the person gets on with something more important to them. In either case, two things are implicit: the emotion, as it is experienced, is regarded as something problematic to be dealt with; and this is a job for the individual to manage.

It may be that neither of these premises is correct: emotions are not, in themselves, the problem; and the individual is not always the best locus of emotional control. As a result, understanding how to facilitate interpersonal emotional regulation is increasingly important to promoting good psychological health. However, given the abundance of time spent talking on social media, a question remains over whether this form of communication can help with interpersonal emotional regulation.

Once other factors are recognised as helpful in regulating a person’s emotions, then an important facet in affect modulation becomes developing appropriate expression and communication of emotions. Clear emotional communication allows what one person feels to be understood by another. That second person can then be recruited, as a sort of external frontal lobe, to add a further source of regulation for the emotions of the first person.

If such an approach is taken to emotional regulation, then the existence of the emotion is not the problem; the issue is........

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