In many social situations, it is necessary to hide what you are feeling.\u00a0 Take, for example, that you hate your boss.\u00a0 Just because you hate him doesn\u2019t mean you can openly express your feelings of dislike for him, because that would leave you, in all likelihood, jobless.\u00a0 In this situation, suppressing your emotional expressions is beneficial to you. Decreasing your outward expression of felt emotions is called emotion suppression.\u00a0 Many adults are very good at suppressing their emotions and do it frequently in their day-to-day lives in order to avoid controversy or in order to stay within social norms.\u00a0 Emotion suppression is beneficial for people in many social contexts, but does using emotion suppression have any other benefits besides its social advantages? Or are there any harmful effects that come with using emotion suppression?<\/p>\n
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Previous research has shown that although emotional suppression decreases outward signs of emotion, it does not actually lower the emotional experience of the person. For example, if a person is saddened by receiving a poor grade but, suppresses their sadness and acts happy to their peers to avoid embarrassment, then they are successfully hiding their feelings from onlookers, but it does not change the amount of sadness the person is actually feeling.\u00a0 Hiding one\u2019s feelings does not make those feelings go away.\u00a0 In addition, emotional suppression actually increases the physical symptoms experienced with the emotional experience, such as sweating or increased heart rate.\u00a0 Psychologists, Richards & Gross completed a study that investigated the effects of emotion suppression on cognitive functioning.\u00a0 More specifically, their study looked at whether or not emotion expression would have consequences on the remembering of events that occurred during suppression.<\/p>\n
Richards and Gross performed two studies to test this.\u00a0 In the first study, 58 female college students were individually shown a slide show of 18 slides, presented in three sets of 6.\u00a0 Each slide had a picture of a wounded man on it with fictitious biographical information beside it.\u00a0 The first and third sets of slides elicited low levels of negative affect because the men were only slightly injured, but the second set called forth high levels of negative affect because the men in this set were badly wounded.\u00a0 The participants were assigned to one of two conditions: suppression or no-suppression.\u00a0 In the suppression group, participants were told to watch the slide show, but not outwardly express their emotions (to behave in such a way that a person watching them would not know what they were feeling).\u00a0 The no-suppression group was not given this instruction, so were allowed to express their emotions freely.\u00a0 After watching the slides, the participants were given two memory tests, which both assessed recall accuracy of the biographical information that accompanied each of the slides.\u00a0 The participants rated how they were feeling during every slide in order to measure their emotional experience.\u00a0 Results showed, like previous research has illustrated, that both groups experienced roughly the same amount of emotion even though the suppression group was not expressing their emotions.\u00a0 Participants using emotional suppression did, however, do significantly worse than the no-suppression group on the memory tests.\u00a0 This shows how emotional suppression affects cognitive functions, like memory. And in this case, specifically, how emotional suppression affects the encoding of information from short-term memory into long-term memory.<\/p>\n
In the second study, the participants were 85 female undergraduate students, and the experimenters used the same procedure as study 1 except for that the second study added the measurement of physiological activity (heartbeat intervals, blood pressure, temperature, and skin conductance) in order to investigate the effects of emotion suppression on the activation of physical responses.\u00a0 The results of this study replicated the findings of study 1, but also showed that the suppression condition experienced a higher activation of the cardiovascular system.\u00a0 This means that emotional suppression causes the body to undergo a higher level of activation in response to the emotional experience, even though both groups are feeling roughly the same amount of emotion.<\/p>\n
These studies show that although the use of emotional suppression can be socially beneficial, it can also cause impairment to cognitive functioning.\u00a0 So before studying for an important test, make sure you are not suppressing emotions, because it will only make it harder for you to encode the information into your long term memory to later be used during your exam. \u00a0Therefore, next time that you decide to suppress your emotions, remember that there are consequences that come with this socially beneficial decision.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Richards, J. M., & Gross, J. J. (1999). Composure at any cost? The cognitive consequences of emotion suppression.\u00a0<\/i>Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 25<\/i>(8), 1033-1044.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In many social situations, it is necessary to hide what you are feeling.\u00a0 Take, for example, that you hate your boss.\u00a0 Just because you hate him doesn\u2019t mean you can openly express your feelings of dislike for him, because that would leave you, in all likelihood, jobless.\u00a0 In this situation, suppressing your emotional expressions is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3247,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[80215],"tags":[117417,129795],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3247"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=261"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":937,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261\/revisions\/937"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=261"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}