Spontaneous emotion regulation during evaluated speaking tasks: Associations with negative affect, anxiety expression, memory, and physiological responding.

Abstract

In these studies, the correlates of spontaneously using expressive suppression and cognitive reappraisal during stressful speeches were examined. Spontaneous emotion regulation means that there were no instructions of how to regulate emotions during the speech. Instead, participants indicated after the speech to what extent they used self-motivated expressive suppression or reappraisal during the task. The results show that suppression is associated with less anxiety expression, greater physiological responding, and less memory for the speech while having no impact on negative affect. In contrast, reappraisal has no impact on physiology and memory while leading to less expression and affect. Taken together, spontaneous emotion regulation in active coping tasks has similar consequences as experimentally induced emotion regulation in passive tasks.

Are expressive suppression and cognitive reappraisal associated with stress-related symptoms?

“…Thus, trauma-exposed individuals who used expressive suppression were no more or less likely to use cognitive reappraisal or vice versa. Further, this lack of strong association is also consistent with a recent study using a stress-inducing evaluative speech paradigm (Egloff et al, 2006). Given that repeated and prolonged exposure to interpersonal trauma may lead to emotion regulation difficulties beyond or in the absence of diagnosable PTSD (e.g., Frewen & Lanius, 2006;Pelcovitz et al, 1997;van der Kolk et al, 2005), our finding of independence of these emotional regulation strategies needs to be further replicated with samples such as those experiencing childhood sexual abuse.…”

“…Nonclinical studies manipulating expressive suppression (Richards & Gross, 2000; for a review, see Gross, 2002), examining individual differences (e.g., Gross & John, 2003;, and using more hybrid designs (Egloff et al, 2006) are surprisingly consistent with the current study; expressive suppression is emerging as a reliably costly strategy associated with negative psychological outcomes. In particular, inhibited emotional expression may be a maladaptive strategy when applied inflexibly (e.g., .…”

“…Reappraisal is associated with less depression, less negative affect, and increased life satisfaction (Garnefski, Teerds, Kraaij, Legerstee, & van den Kommer, 2004;Garnefski & Kraaij, 2006;, and induced reappraisal decreases negative emotion and neither impairs memory nor increases arousal (Egloff, Schmukle, Burns, & Schwerdtfeger, 2006;Richards & Gross, 2000;Richards et al, 2003;Gross & Thompson, 2006) and may actually lessen physiological arousal (Dandoy & Goldstein, 1990). The use of reappraisal is also higher in healthy controls compared to individuals with clinical levels of anxiety and/or depression (Garnefski et al, 2002;Garnefski et al, 2004).…”

Enhanced post-learning memory consolidation is influenced by arousal predisposition and emotion regulation but not by stimulus valence or arousal

“…In contrast, studies of reappraisal have demonstrated successful reduction of emotion expression along with decreased negative affect, non-significant reductions in physiological response (Egloff et al, 2006;Gross, 1998a;Gross & John, 2003;Richards & Gross, 2000), and reduced amygdala activation (Goldin et al, 2008;Ochsner et al, 2004).…”

“…Such studies have demonstrated that suppression is associated with reduced retrieval (Bonanno, Papa, Lalande, Westphal, & Coifman, 2004;Egloff et al, 2006;Richards & Gross, 1999, 2000, while reappraisal is associated with unaltered (Egloff et al, 2006;Richards & Gross, 2000) or with enhanced retrieval (Dillon, Ritchey, Johnson, & LaBar, 2007;Richards & Gross, 2000). However, these studies all used very short-term retention tests (10 min; Dillon et al, used 1 h).…”