Stephanie Coontz: People experience an emotion and immediately respond to it without thinking, oh, what is this emotion? What are the possible outcomes if i express my response in such and such a way? And so on. I find ta lot of that is, i don't want to say, a veneer quite. They would just project a slight veneer of sang foad when they were really boiling with anger. She says people who come up for their kind of fix then walk away thinking that they have mastered some form of emotion regulation.