Emotion regulation has been viewed as a deliberate strategy to modulate one's undesirable state. Accordingly, much of the previous emotion regulation researches have examined conscious and deliberate ways of emotion regulation. Recently, however, some researchers began to explore the automaticity of emotion regulation. Their approach to the automatic emotion regulation integrates paradigms and constructs from research on automaticity and deliberative emotion regulation. This article reviews assumptions and theoretical backgrounds put forth by recent advances in automatic emotion regulation research which utilizes automatic goal pursuit and emotional priming techniques, a radical departure from basic methods employed in previous emotion regulation research. Finally, future directions for automatic emotion regulation research will be discussed.