Interpersonal emotion regulation strategies: Enabling flexibility in high-stress work environments

While scholars have demonstrated that emotions play a central role in cognition, behavior, and decision making, most of the studies on emotions in work contexts show that emotions, or their expression, are often suppressed. We thus investigated how workers in high-stress work environments deal with emotions and remain functional by focusing on the range of extrinsic regulation strategies used by workers in these environments. Drawing from participant observations and in-depth, semistructured interviews, we show how police officers are flexible in their choices of emotion-regulation strategies and how contextual factors emerge as the crux of this process. We contribute to the understanding of regulatory flexibility—defined as the process of matching emotion regulation strategies to environmental circumstances as they unfold in real work situations—by identifying two main enabling factors: coregulation and third party interference.