Expressive suppression can effectively reduce negative emotions under specific conditions

Published in the Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin, a new study reveals that expressive suppression reduces negative emotions at both experiential and expressive levels, challenging long standing assumptions about its ineffectiveness.

Jessica L. Jones and colleagues investigated the experiential effects of expressive suppression, a strategy within the broader domain of emotion regulation. Emotion regulation refers to the processes by which individuals influence their emotional experiences and expressions. Two commonly studied strategies are cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression.

Cognitive reappraisal involves reinterpreting a situation to change its emotional impact, typically before an emotional response fully develops. In contrast, expressive suppression occurs after an emotional response has been triggered and focuses on inhibiting the outward display of emotions, such as facial expressions or gestures.

While cognitive reappraisal is widely recognized as effective in reducing both the intensity of emotional experiences and their outward expressions, expressive suppression has often been considered less effective, impacting only external displays while leaving internal experiences unchanged. However, recent research has suggested that suppression may have subtle effects on emotional experiences, especially when studied within participants over time rather than between different groups. Motivated by this contradiction in the literature, Jones and colleagues designed their research to clarify whether suppression can indeed alter internal emotional experiences and under what conditions it might be effective.

In Study 1, the researchers reanalyzed data from a previous study by Livingstone and Isaacowitz (2018), involving 163 participants aged 18 to 88. Participants were instructed to view emotionally negative images drawn from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) under three conditions: cognitive reappraisal, expressive suppression, or general regulation, which served as a control condition. Each participant completed three separate blocks, each corresponding to one of these strategies.

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During the tasks, participants used an analog slider to continuously rate their negative emotional responses while viewing images. These ratings allowed the researchers to measure changes in negative affect in real-time. The images were randomized and presented with standardized timing to control for stimulus-induced variability.

Study 2 expanded on this by implementing a randomized within-subject design, involving 234 undergraduate participants aged 18 to 33. Participants were presented with negative and neutral images of varying intensity. These images were displayed in randomized blocks, paired with three different regulatory instructions: expressive suppression, cognitive reappraisal, or no regulation. Participants rated their emotional negativity after each trial. To prevent habituation, neutral trials were interspersed among negative trials at regular intervals. Importantly, this study refined suppression instructions to avoid explicitly directing participants to alter their emotional experiences, ensuring that any changes in affect were genuinely attributable to suppression alone.

The findings of Study 1 indicated that expressive suppression significantly reduced participants’ negative emotions compared to the general regulation condition, albeit less effectively than cognitive reappraisal. Participants reported the lowest levels of negative affect when using reappraisal strategies, which involved reframing their emotional interpretation of the images. Interestingly, expressive suppression also reduced negative affect compared to general regulation, contradicting the long-held assumption that suppression merely suppresses outward expression without influencing internal experience.

Study 2 corroborated these results, showing that expressive suppression lowered negative affect compared to the no-regulation control condition. While suppression was again less effective than cognitive reappraisal, its impact on reducing negative emotions remained statistically significant. Notably, the researchers found that suppression’s effects were consistent across images of low, moderate, and high intensity, suggesting that the strategy’s efficacy is not contingent on the emotional intensity of the stimuli. Additionally, responses were not influenced by strategies used in preceding trials, ruling out carryover effects as an explanation for the findings.

Combined, the results from both studies provide evidence that suppression can be an effective tool for emotion regulation, particularly when other strategies may not be feasible.

The authors acknowledge the limited generalizability of findings to real-life contexts, as the studies relied on static images rather than dynamic social interactions.

The research, “Conceal and Don’t Feel as Much? Experiential Effects of Expressive Suppression,” was authored by Jessica L. Jones, Derek M. Isaacowitz, and Özlem Ayduk.