The Phenomenology of Emotion Regulation: Feeling and Agency

This edited volume places emotion regulation-a central topic in contemporary psychology-at the heart of philosophical inquiry. While the modulation of affect has long been a concern in philosophical traditions, the rise of the modern concept of "emotion" shifted much of the debate toward psychological research. As a result, the social, ethical, and philosophical dimensions of shaping affective experience have increasingly fallen out of focus in both empirical and theoretical investigations of emotion regulation. The Phenomenology of Emotion Regulation reconnects these strands. It brings philosophical, phenomenological, and psychological perspectives back into dialogue, offering a comprehensive exploration of how we navigate, modulate, and make sense of affective experience in everyday life. Drawing on phenomenological, embodied, enactivist, and psychopathological approaches, the contributions illuminate the experiential dimension of emotion regulation-how it is lived, felt, enacted, and understood from the first-person perspective. It is the first comprehensive collection offering a phenomenological exploration of emotion regulation. The chapters analyse how regulatory processes both shape and are shaped by our experience of the world, by forms of self-understanding, and by interactions with others. They show how regulative practices emerge from, respond to, and transform the structures of a person's lived world. This volume examines the roles of central phenomenological concepts-such as intentionality, embodiment, intersubjectivity, habit, action, narrativity, normativity, and self-awareness-in processes of emotion regulation and demonstrates how these dimensions operate across diverse contexts. These include mental health and psychopathology, extreme situations, political and collective emotions, and affective phenomena such as anxiety, envy, shame, and hate. By revealing how emotion regulation is woven into the texture of lived experience, The Phenomenology of Emotion Regulation offers new insights into the phenomenological structure of emotional life and into the forms of agency active within affective experience. Complementing existing psychological models, it provides refined conceptual tools and an expanded phenomenological vocabulary. This interdisciplinary collection deepens theoretical understanding, strengthens connections between philosophy and psychology, and opens new directions for research into emotional life and its regulation.