I have been doing a lot of research around the subject of emotional resilience, particularly from a medical / neurological perspective.
There are a couple of terms that are emerging from the literature which are very useful and really need to enter the public lexicon; emotion regulation and impulse control.
Emotional resilience is largely becoming seen as the ability to bounce back after some negative emotional event.
Emotion regulation is somewhat of a bigger concept than emotional resilience and includes the idea of ’state control’ or the ability to consciously change emotional state at will and is used extensively in the medical literature.
Both ‘emotional resilience’ and ‘emotion regulation’ are frequently used interchangeably in the literature.
Impulse control is an interesting concept that is often linked to emotional regulation. Reading the literature researchers are clearly seeing impulse control as separate (but linked) from emotion regulation. When you think about it impulses are more of a ‘knee jerk’ habit than a pure emotion. Impulses are drives towards a certain behaviour, they have an emotional basis and are either a direct response to an emotion or are behavioural or cognitive habit that has become associated to an emotion.
Emotional maturity is a catchall judgment / description or measurement of the level of emotional acuity a person has in comparison to others. Maturity is a comparative concept. It tends to be used to incorporate all of the above terms and more.
Just doing a quick literature search I found the following:
In the management / leadership literature the term emotional resilience is the most frequently used term. There is very little reference to impulse control.
In the medical literature ‘emotional resilience’ is a growing phrase used and has recently overtaken ‘emotion regulation’ and ‘impulse control’ in terms of popularity. Neurological papers tend to talk more about emotion regulation than other types of medical research articles. In total there are more articles about emotion regulation its just that the idea of emotional resilience has recently overtaken emotion regulation in terms of use.
Emotional resilience is most often used in psychological research journals with emotion regulation and impulse control following close behind.
Psychiatry journals tend to refer to emotion regulation above all other terms.
Reading the articles I do get the sense that the terms emotional resilience and emotion regulation are being used interchangeably even though they do have different meanings. In the public especially the realm of the internet when you put the terms in parenthesis the following falls out:
“Emotional Resilience” 72,000 hits
“Emotion Regulation” returns 165,000 hits
“Impulse control” brings back a whopping 603,000 hits
“Emotional maturity” has 253,000 results.
But what about terms searched for? These figures are terms searched for globally per month.
Emotional resilience has approx 1,900 searches per month
Emotion regulation has 6,600 searches per month
Emotional maturity also has about 6,600 searches per month
Impulse control has approximately 22,200 searches per month.
Interesting…
