A series of studies in the United States and on the island of Taiwan found that people suppress their positive emotions less often than they suppress their negative emotions. However, suppression of positive—but not negative—emotions was consistently associated with lower well-being. The research was published in Affective Science.
Many people habitually suppress outward displays of their emotions. Various world cultures discourage showing certain emotions in public, considering such displays inappropriate. Men, in particular, are often expected to refrain from showing emotions, with many cultures assigning various negative qualities to men who frequently display emotions, especially negative ones.
Researchers have traditionally viewed the suppression of emotional displays as taxing for mental health and associated with lower well-being. One line of reasoning suggests that suppressing emotions can elicit unpleasant feelings of inauthenticity, which stand in opposition to the desire to be authentic and to freely express one’s true self. Suppressing emotions also requires considerable cognitive effort, leading many researchers to view suppression as an indicator of poor emotional functioning.
Study author Chen-Wei Yu and his colleagues note that the relationship between emotional suppression and well-being may be more nuanced; it might be specifically the suppression of positive emotions that diminishes well-being, not the suppression of negative emotions. They conducted a series of three studies to investigate whether tendencies to suppress negative and positive emotions are distinct personal characteristics and how these tendencies are associated with various aspects of well-being.
In the first study, the authors examined three Taiwanese datasets containing data from 479 young adult participants, including responses to the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (an assessment of emotion regulation strategies) and various well-being measures.
In the second study, the authors analyzed two datasets from culturally different contexts. One dataset came from the National Survey of Midlife Development in the United States (MIDUS), while the other came from the Pittsburgh Cold study, which examines the effects of exposure to the common cold virus in a sample of healthy U.S. adults. These datasets also included responses to the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire and a range of well-being measures.
Study 3 included 250 U.S. participants recruited via Prolific and 205 participants from Taiwan. They completed the same emotion regulation assessment as in the previous studies, although the researchers made minor modifications to resolve wording issues in the original form, along with an assessment of well-being.
The results of the first study showed that individuals tend to suppress their negative emotions more frequently than they suppress positive emotions. Suppression of positive and negative emotions was associated, but only moderately, indicating that individuals often apply different levels of suppression to positive and negative emotions. Suppression of positive emotions, but not negative emotions, was somewhat associated with lower well-being.
The second study confirmed these findings, showing only a moderate association between the suppression of positive and negative emotions in individuals. Once again, suppression of positive emotions was associated with lower well-being, while suppression of negative emotions was not.
Finally, the third study showed that both in Taiwan and in the United States, individuals tend to suppress negative emotions more frequently than positive emotions. The remaining findings were consistent with those of the previous studies.
“The present investigation established the separability of differential adaptiveness of habitual expressive suppression of positive and of negative emotions. Across three studies and two culturally distinct regions (i.e., Taiwan, US), we found that (a) people’s suppression of positive (vs. negative) emotions was engaged less and was less integral to their general suppression tendencies, (b) the two forms of suppression were only moderately correlated, and (c) only suppression of positive, but not of negative, emotions predicted lower wellbeing,” the study authors concluded.
The study sheds light on the links between suppressing emotions and well-being. However, it should be noted that the study was solely based on self-reports, leaving room for reporting bias to affect the results. Additionally, the design of the studies does not allow any cause-and-effect conclusions to be derived from the findings.
The paper, “Habitual Expressive Suppression of Positive, but not Negative, Emotions Consistently Predicts Lower Well-being across Two Culturally Distinct Regions,” was authored by Chen-Wei Yu, Claudia Haase, and Jen-Ho Chang.