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| Science watch Stoicism reconsidered
Concealing emotions hampers memory of distressing situations,
a new study finds. BY SIRI CARPENTER From Monitor on Psychology:
http://www.apa.org/monitor/sw.html
Monitor staff In the Star Trek universe, the ever-logical Vulcans
attribute their cognitive prowess to their knack for controlling
emotions that inhibit rational thinking. It seems to work for
the Vulcans. But a new study of emotion regulation and memory
suggests that humans might want to think twice before attempting
to banish even painful emotions from their minds--and faces. Psychologists
have long known that people adopt many different strategies for
controlling their feelings. They may, for example, distract themselves
with other activities or thoughts, seek social support, conceal
their feelings from others or reconceptualize events as less emotional
or personally relevant. Psychologists Jane Richards, PhD, of the
University of Washington, and James Gross, PhD, of Stanford University,
have discovered that two common strategies for regulating emotions
differ in how they affect people's memory for upsetting events.
When people try to keep negative emotions from showing--a strategy
that Richards and Gross call "expressive suppression"--their memory
for emotional situations suffers as a result. That's not the case,
the researchers found, when people use an approach called "reappraisal,"
reconstruing emotional events as less upsetting--for example,
framing an upcoming test as a challenge rather than as a threat.
The findings, published in this month's Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology (Vol. 79, No. 3), add to a growing consensus
that the ways people control their thoughts and feelings can have
sweeping implications. "There's an emerging consistency in the
self-regulation literature showing that there's no free lunch,"
says Yale University psychologist Peter Salovey, PhD. "We know
that suppressing unwanted thought takes psychological resources.
We know that trying to bolster your self-esteem takes resources.
And now we know that actively trying to suppress an emotion takes
resources and that that resource depletion is going to have psychological
costs." "People really are creative and are quite intuitive when
you ask them to control their emotions--they have a big bag of
tricks to draw on," observes Richards. "What this research suggests
is that how we regulate our emotions in the face of life's trials
and tribulations matters." Not all strategies are created equal
Although people have a long menu of emotion regulation strategies
to choose from, some approaches appear to be more successful than
others at reshaping affective experience. Recent studies have
shown, for instance, that people can more effectively tamp down
negative feelings--and even the physiological signs that accompany
them, like high blood pressure--by reconstruing an emotional situation
than by trying to simply blot out emotional expression. These
findings led Richards and Gross to wonder whether different emotion
regulation strategies also have consequences for cognitive functioning,
including memory. In an initial experiment, the researchers showed
research participants a short clip from the film "Fatal Attraction,"
in which a married couple argues over his having had a disastrous
affair with another woman. The distraught couple's daughter looks
on, sobbing. Richards and Gross selected the scene because it
elicits negative emotions such as sadness, anxiety and anger.
The researchers randomly assigned some participants to an expressive
suppression condition, instructing them not to let their feelings
show. Participants in a control condition were instructed only
to watch and listen carefully to the film clip. Results revealed
that even though the two groups showed no difference in their
emotional experience, participants in the expressive suppression
condition had poorer memory for what was said and done in the
clip than did control participants. This finding was promising,
Richards and Gross say, because it was the first evidence that
emotion regulation can hinder cognitive functioning. But the results
did not resolve how expressive suppression influences memory,
how much emotions' intensity matters or whether the phenomenon
extends to other regulatory strategies. To address these questions,
the researchers mounted a second, more complex experiment. They
suspected that expressive suppression's effect on memory was a
side effect of people's attempts to continually monitor their
behavior, reminding themselves not to let their emotions show.
Such self-monitoring might include a silent, or subvocal, dialogue
with oneself: "Am I showing emotion? I don't want to show emotion.
Uh oh, I might be showing emotion. There, I just held back an
impulse." If so, then subvocal self-monitoring should disrupt
people's verbal processing of what they're seeing and hearing.
Identifying a mechanism As a test of that possibility, Richards
and Gross's second experiment included measures of both verbal
and nonverbal memory. They also explored whether regulating emotions
of differing intensity causes proportional memory deficits. Finally,
the researchers examined whether a second emotion regulation strategy,
reappraisal, would have similar effects on memory. Because reappraisal
occurs in advance of a distressing event and doesn't require continual
monitoring, the researchers reasoned, it is less likely than expressive
suppression to tie up cognitive resources and interfere with memory.
To evoke negative emotions in the experiment, Richards and Gross
had participants view slides of people who had been badly injured.
Some of these images were designed to arouse strong negative feelings,
including images of people with severe cuts, bruises and burns.
Other images were less emotion provoking, depicting people who
had ostensibly been injured at an earlier time but who had no
remaining visible injuries. Each image was accompanied by an audio
account of the injured person's name, occupation and cause of
injury. The experimenters asked participants who had been randomly
assigned to the expressive suppression condition to adopt a neutral
facial expression, keeping their facial muscles still. They asked
participants in the reappraisal condition to adopt a neutral attitude
and to view the slides with "the detached interest of a medical
professional," rather than as personally or emotionally relevant
to them. A third group of participants simply watched the slides.
As in their first experiment, Richards and Gross found that participants
in the expressive suppression condition showed poorer memory than
did control participants, despite no difference in the two groups'
emotional experience. But as the researchers expected, that finding
was limited to verbal memory. When they were asked to pick which
of an array of subtly different versions of each slide had been
shown earlier, suppression and control participants were equally
accurate. In contrast, when participants were prompted to recall
the information that had been presented verbally with each slide,
those in the suppression group remembered fewer details than did
those in the control group. This pattern held for participants
exposed to both strongly and weakly negative slides, suggesting
that self-monitoring demands similar cognitive resources regardless
of the intensity of the emotions being suppressed. Unlike expressive
suppression, Richards and Gross found, reappraisal did not impair
memory. Participants in the reappraisal group did just as well
as control participants on verbal recall and actually performed
better than control participants on nonverbal recall--perhaps,
the researchers speculate, because taking the perspective of a
medical professional made them more attuned to visual details
than would ordinarily be the case. Following the two lab experiments,
Richards and Gross conducted a field study of naturally occurring
emotion regulation and memory for emotional events. Echoing the
experimental results, this study showed that people who tended
to regulate emotion by suppressing emotional expression remembered
fewer recent emotional situations than did people who relied on
reappraisal. Far-reaching ramifications Many emotion researchers
have been favorably impressed by Richards and Gross's findings.
"Western thinking has always kept affect and cognition separate--there's
passion and there's reason, and when they come together it's not
supposed to be adaptive," remarks Salovey. "But this study shows
that it's not that emotions get in the way of cognition--it's
that certain ways of fighting emotions get in the way of cognition.
I think the historical debate on the relationship between passion
and reason is a little bit turned on its head in this paper."
Richards and Gross's findings also have widespread practical repercussions,
comments University of California, Riverside, psychologist Sonja
Lyubomirsky, PhD. For example, she says, the new findings suggest
jurors' memory for evidence presented in a trial may be impaired
by efforts to appear calm and collected while hearing the evidence.
University of California, Berkeley psychologist Ann Kring, PhD,
adds that "the findings have implications for basic research on
emotion and for psychotherapeutic interventions that seek to change
people's beliefs and emotional styles." However, she cautions,
the studies need to be replicated and expanded to examine other
emotions and regulatory strategies. In addition, Kring suggests,
future research should clarify how expressive suppression influences
memory. "The idea of subvocal self-monitoring as a possible mechanism
for interfering with verbal memory is an interesting speculation,"
she says. But because the authors didn't directly measure subvocal
monitoring, she argues, it's not certain such a process is responsible
for participants' poor verbal memory. Indeed, DePaul University
psychologist Ralph Erber suggests, an alternative explanation
may be that suppression is more difficult for people to implement
than is reappraisal. Such difficulty, he argues, could hamper
people's ability to pay attention to the task at hand. "It's certainly
possible that expressive suppression is somehow more taxing or
cognitively difficult than reappraisal," acknowledges Gross. In
fact, he says, the idea that suppression creates an ongoing demand
to monitor one's emotional response is integral to the model he
and Richards present. But, he says, "I don't think our findings
can be accounted for by postulating that suppression is simply
a more difficult task than reappraisal, because when you ask participants
to rate the difficulty of suppression and reappraisal tasks, they
rate the two as equally difficult." Future directions: health
and relationships Following up on the new findings, Richards and
Gross are now looking into the ramifications of different regulatory
approaches for cardiovascular health and psychological disorders
such as depression and anxiety. And, they're starting to look
at how people's regulatory strategies affect not only themselves,
but those around them. In experiments now under way, the researchers
are investigating how expressive suppression and other regulatory
strategies affect memory for social interactions in personal relationships.
Preliminary results of their experiments indicate that when romantic
couples are asked to discuss conflicts, those instructed to suppress
emotional expression show poorer memory for the discussion than
do those in a control condition. Despite the mounting evidence
of expressive suppression's negative effects, Gross emphasizes,
"I wouldn't want to wipe it out of my regulatory repertoire. I
think suppression has a very important place in the back and forth
of everyday life. "It may sometimes be better to disguise your
feelings, even if it compromises your ability to remember a heated
exchange," Gross says. "If you're interacting with a boss who's
acting obnoxiously, for example, that may or may not be the time
to let your boss have it." Gross speculates that ultimately, people's
ability to smoothly transition between regulatory strategies may
prove more important to psychological and physical well-being
than whether or not they call any one strategy into service. He
says, "My money is on a very simple proposition: that it's not
whether or not you suppress that's important, but how flexible
you are--how varied is your palette?"
This article is part of the Monitor's "Science Watch" series,
which reports news from APA's journals. |
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