Explaining Community Resilience Through Emotional Regulation

Abstract

Adversity such as social disruption, economic hardship, and collective crises often threatens psychological and social stability within communities. Despite these challenges, individuals and communities show different capacities to adapt, leading to growing scholarly attention to the concept of resilience. This study aims to analyze how affect regulation functions as a mechanism that explains resilience within community contexts. The research employed a qualitative design using conceptual literature analysis. Secondary data were collected from peer reviewed journal articles and scholarly publications related to resilience, coping processes, and emotion regulation. The unit of analysis consisted of theoretical concepts and empirical findings in existing resilience literature. Data were analyzed through theoretical synthesis guided by the affect regulation framework in order to examine how emotional regulation strategies interact with social context in shaping resilience processes. The analysis shows that affect regulation connects individual emotional responses with collective social dynamics, allowing communities to sustain adaptive responses during adversity. These findings indicate that resilience develops through interactions between emotional regulation processes and contextual factors such as social relationships, cultural norms, and shared interpretations of adversity. This study contributes to resilience research by extending the affect regulation framework from an individual psychological perspective toward a broader understanding of community level resilience.