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Preventing Emotions

An alternative to managing emotions after they occur is to prevent unwanted emotions from happening in the first place. Four strategies are commonly used for preventing emotions (Gross et al., 2006), the first of which is encounter avoidance: staying away from people, places, or activities that you know will provoke emotions you don’t want to experience. For example, suppose that seeing a former romantic partner always provokes intense and unpleasant emotions within you. To use encounter avoidance, you might find out your ex’s work or class schedule and then adjust your own schedule so that you systematically avoid running into him or her.

A second preventive strategy is encounter structuring: intentionally avoiding specific topics that you know will provoke unwanted emotion during encounters with others. For example, I love my in-laws (honestly!), but my political attitudes are very different from theirs. Early in our acquaintanceship, my father-in-law and I would both get angry whenever we discussed politics. After a few such battles, we agreed to avoid this topic and now structure our encounters so politics isn’t discussed.

A third preventive strategy is attention focus: intentionally devoting your attention only to aspects of an event or encounter that you know will not provoke an undesired emotion. Imagine that you’re at a family get-together. As your dad is showing everyone footage from your family’s recent vacation, two of your cousins sitting in the back of the room are quietly making fun of your father’s new haircut. To use attention focus, you would actively keep watching and listening to your dad so that your cousins’ rudeness doesn’t set you off.

A fourth way people preventively manage emotion is deactivation: systematically desensitizing yourself to emotional experience (Fuendeling, 1998). Some people, especially after experiencing a traumatic emotional event, decide that they no longer want to feel anything. The result is an overall deadening of emotion. Though the desire to use this strategy is understandable, deactivation can trigger deep depression.