Abstract: Automatic emotion regulation is a goal-driven change in any aspect of one’s emotion without making a conscious decision, paying attention to the process of regulating emotion, or engaging in deliberate control. How to effectively manipulate automatic emotion regulation is a problem for researchers. Two kinds of methods have been applied in the literature: one is aiming at seeking the individual differences in automatic emotion regulation by emotion regulation-Implicit Association Test, resting prefrontal asymmetric activation measurement or emotion regulation questionnaire; the other method attempts to activate different regulation tendency by taking advantage of priming technique. Both of these two methods provide evidences for the existence and the availability of automatic emotion regulation. Priming technique can afford a stronger manipulation comparatively. When it comes to future researches, the interaction of individual differences and priming tendency in automatic emotion regulation should be paid enough attention on. Moreover, it’s also important to explore the processing of automatic emotion regulation.

Key words: automatic emotion regulation, priming, individual difference