This Time, It’s Real: Affective Flexibility, Time Scales, Feedback Loops, and the Regulation of Emotion

Because both emotional arousal and regulation are continuous, ongoing processes, it is difficult, if not impossible, to separate them. Thus, affective dynamics can reveal the regulation of emotion as it occurs in real time. One way that this can be done is through the examination of intra- and interpersonal flexibility or the transitions into and out of affective states. The present article reviews and then expands upon the Flex3 model of real-time dynamic and reactive flexibility, specifying the ways in which individual differences in emotion regulation manifest as differences in flexibility. The differences in results at the real-time scale versus diurnal variability are also discussed within an emotion regulation framework.