Emotions were historically seen as neural activation states without a function. However, recent research provides evidence that emotions are functional (e.g., [4]). Emotions have a facilitating function in decision making, prepare a person for rapid motor responses, and provide information regarding the ongoing match between organism and environment. Emotions also have a social function. They provide us information about others ’ behavioural intentions, and script our social behaviour [5]. In the past two decades, psychological research has started to focus more on emotion regulation (e.g., [5, 6, 9, 11]). In brief, emotion regulation is the process humans undertake in order to affect their emotional response. Recent neurological findings (such as bidirectional links between limbic centers, which generate emotion, and cortical centers, which regulate emotion) have changed the consensus that emotion regulation is a simple, top-down controlled process [5]. This article introduces a computational model to simulate emotion regulation, based on the process model described informally by Gross [5, 6]. Such a model can be used for different purposes. In the first place, from a Cognitive Science perspective, it can provide insight in the process of emotion regulation. This may be useful for the purpose of developing therapies for persons that have difficulties in regulating their emotions [3], for example, in work with forensic inpatients. In addition, a model for emotio
