Capturing Emotional Suppression as it Naturally Unfolds in Couple Interactions

Most research examining the consequences of suppressing emotional expression has focused on experimentally manipulated, conscious suppression. This study examined suppression as it naturally occurred in couple discussions (n = 105) of an upsetting event. A novel Suppression Index (SI) was created by calculating the difference between continuous selfreports of emotional experience, obtained using cued recall, and coders’ continuous ratings of expressed emotion, obtained using a naïve coding approach. Suppression was the most common strategy for regulating emotional expression in both men and women, with individual differences in the degree to which people suppressed emotion. Autocorrelations on the SI were run to create a Suppressive Rigidity (Srig) score that gauges the degree to which suppression varied over the course of the conversation. Srig was consistent across contexts, suggesting that Srig captures stable individual differences. In women, greater suppression of negative emotions and more rigid application of suppression was predictive of lower marital satisfaction, indicating that suppressive behavior may have consequences in relationships. Interpretations and implications of these findings are discussed. CAPTURING EMOTIONAL SUPPRESSION Dworkin 3 Capturing Emotional Suppression as it Naturally Unfolds in Couple Interactions Over the past few decades it has become clear that the way a couple resolves emotionladen conflicts is closely tied to the health and long-term success of a relationship (e.g., Bradbury & Fincham, 1990; Christensen, 1988; Gottman, 1994; Gottman & Levenson, 2004). Negative emotion dynamics, like rapid escalation of negative affect or clashing interaction styles, have been strongly associated with decreased marital satisfaction in both partners (Christensen & Heavey, 1990; Heavey, Layne, & Christensen, 1993) and increased risk of divorce (Carrere& Gottman, 1999; Gottman, Coan, Carrere, & Swanson, 1998). Yet the regulation of emotions during interactions has been shown to decrease emotional arousal in both partners (Bloch, Haase, & Levenson, 2014; Kappas, 2011), leading to more effective communication (Isen, 1999; Wile, 2002) and increased relationship stability over time (Gottman, Coan, Carrere, & Swanson, 1998). In spite of the growing interest in emotion regulation (Schulz & Lazarus, 2012) and the promising effects it has shown in couple interactions, few studies have looked specifically at emotion regulation processes in romantic relationships. This review will focus on the use and potential effects of one specific regulation strategy, the suppression of emotional expression, within the couple interaction context. The idea of suppressing the outward expression of emotion has long captured people’s attention. Though attitudes about hiding or suppressing emotion differ across cultures (Butler, Lee, & Gross, 2007), in the United States “bottling up” one’s emotions is largely perceived as a psychologically and even physically harmful behavior (Gross & Levenson, 1997). As the amount of research examining the regulation of emotions has increased in the past few decades (Schulz & Lazarus, 2012), our understanding of how regulation works, what different strategies people use to regulate, and what effects they have has grown immensely (Gross, Sheppes, & Urry, CAPTURING EMOTIONAL SUPPRESSION Dworkin 4 2011). As one of those strategies, emotion suppression has been studied extensively, with the results often supporting the popular notions about its negative consequences (Gross & Levenson, 1993; Gross & John, 2002; Richards, Butler, & Gross, 2003; Chapman, Fiscella, Kawachi, Duberstein, & Muennig, 2013). However, attempts to label the entire strategy as either beneficial or harmful have limited the ways in which researchers approach the question of suppression’s efficacy (Bonanno & Burton, 2013), and the methodological approaches used in much of the research have limited the degree to which findings can be applied to real world settings. Building on the work of Bonanno (Bonanno & Burton, 2013), the current study aims to enhance our understanding of suppression by determining when emotion suppression is beneficial or harmful instead of simply whether it is beneficial or harmful. This study attempts to achieve this goal by investigating naturally-occurring suppression in couple interactions and by measuring how flexibly suppression is used in this context. To frame the goals and methods of this study, the relevant literature will be reviewed in this introduction. First I will examine theory and research on emotion regulation, with a specific focus on the research and current ideas regarding emotion suppression. I will then discuss the related concepts of regulatory flexibility and emotion inertia, and consider their potential for advancing suppression research. Finally, I will review existing research on the regulation of emotion in marital and couple interactions. Emotion and Emotion Regulation The literature on emotion defines emotion as an adaptive system of organized responses to stimuli that has three distinct outputs, typically referred to as the physiological, experiential, and expressive (or behavioral) components (e.g., Rosenberg & Ekman, 1994; Bulteel, Ceulemans, Thompson, Waugh, Gotlib, Tuerlinckx, & Kuppens, 2014). The physiological component consists of changes in the body’s physical systems, including increases or decreases in heart rate or perspiration. The experiential component refers to a person’s subjective experience of emotion. CAPTURING EMOTIONAL SUPPRESSION Dworkin 5 Since this aspect is entirely subjective it is difficult to measure empirically in any way other than self-report methods (Schulz & Waldinger, 2004). The behavioral dimension of emotion is the external observable aspect of an emotion, which can be as extreme as a person running away from a situation or as subtle as a slight, unconscious change in facial expression. The prevailing theory of emotion posits that emotions evolved as mechanisms for quickly organizing these separate systems to respond appropriately and quickly to events occurring to a person that have stakes for the individual (Bonanno, Papa, Lalande, Westphal, & Coifman, 2004; Butler, Gross, & Barnard, 2014; Gross, 2002; Rosenberg & Ekman, 1994; Schulz & Lazarus, 2012). This framework relies on the idea that these three channels of response (i.e., physiology, experience, and expression) serve several discrete purposes during moments of low emotional relevance. Then, during personally relevant events that require rapid reactions, emotion serves to align the systems towards one adaptive response (Bulteel et al., 2014). While this integration of responses connected to emotion is often useful when responding to an event, the evolutionary forces that shaped this unified response may not be as applicable in today’s world. As a result, situations often occur in which some or all of the aspects of an emotional response can be socially or physically harmful (Gross, 1999). When a situation arises in which a particular emotional response is perceived as having the potential to be detrimental to one’s situational goals, people often attempt to adjust the response of one or more of the three components of the emotion system to better facilitate the achievement of these goals (Schulz & Lazarus, 2012). The formal term for this emotional adjustment is emotion regulation. It is defined as “the process by which individuals influence which emotions they have, when they have them, and how they experience and express these emotions” (Gross, 1998, p. 275). Using this definition, emotion regulation includes not only the adjustment of the three component response channels, but also the adjustment of situations or perceptions leading up to a potential emotional response. CAPTURING EMOTIONAL SUPPRESSION Dworkin 6 Regulation covers a broad scope of actions, and thus can take many different forms. It can be used to adjust both positive and negative emotions, it can occur either consciously or unconsciously, and it can be either beneficial or detrimental (Parrott, 1993; Gross, 2002). As mentioned previously, regulation can take place either before, during, or after the occurrence of an emotional event and the corresponding emotional responses. Gross puts forth a process model of emotion regulation that takes this into account, in which he argues for a distinction between antecedentand response-focused regulation strategies (Gross, 1998). Specifically, Gross lays out a pathway for emotion generation in which the regulation of emotion is thought to occur at one or more of five distinct time points. These points are situation selection, situation modification, attentional deployment, cognitive change, and response modulation (Gross, 1998). More broadly, the first two points relate to entering into, avoiding, or actively altering a situation that could potentially be emotion inducing, the third refers to how focused you are on the emotional aspect of the situation, and the fourth is the stage at which you attribute a meaning to the experience, or what is more generally referred to as appraisal by emotion theorists (e.g., Lazarus, 1991). The final stage takes place after a meaning has been appraised and initial emotion responses have been triggered, and it involves the degree to which you attempt to adjust these responses (Gross, 2002). Antecedent-focused regulation strategies are conceptualized as taking place in one of the first four periods of emotion generation, while response-focused regulation strategies occur in the final stage once responses have been generated. One example of an antecedent-focused strategy would be avoiding a conversation with someone you believe might make you upset. This strategy would take place during the situation selection stage, as it involves actively choosing not to put yourself in the situation you believe might be emotion-inducing. Alternately,