Expression Suppression And The Idea Of ​​suppression Of Emotional Regulation

During the last 30 years,researchers have been focused on experiential,physiological aspects influenced by different kinds of emotion regulation strategies.Suppression is often used emotion regulation by people.According to the former research,suppression can also be devided into expressive suppression and thought suppression.Expressive suppression means suppressing one's way to express feelings consciously,which is a typical strategy to adjust emotion through changing one's behavior after the feeling reaction.(Gross,1998) Thought suppression means suppressing one's emotional idea consciously,and it means diverting one's attention into another or abstracted idea,which does not have its concrete concern. (Wegner,1994 )This research focuses that expressive suppression and thought suppression affect physiology and subjective experience under positive and negative emotional states in the laboratory,and the relationship between strategy of suppression and personality,adaptation during the daily life.The three main researchful themes are that if the expressive suppression and thought suppression can cause the strengthen of sympathetic nerve,if expressive suppression and thought suppression can affect positive and negative subjective emotional,and when one often use expressive suppression and thought suppression,it can affect his mental health,if this influence has relationship with personality factor.The research is divided into three parts.There are 59 subjects to have a laboratory research in research one,and it adopts 3(natural watching,expressive suppression,thought suppression)×2(positive film, negatived film) mixed design.The research two is a questionaire formulation of thought suppression.The research three is questionaire survey to study the relationship between expressive suppression,thought suppression and personality,adaptation,which surveys 232 college students.The three main conclusions are as followings:Firstly,when watching positive and negative film,persons using the expressive suppression were evidenced greater sympathetic arousal(greater skin conduction reaction change,,heart rate increases more greatly).When only watching negative film,compare with natural viewing,the subjects with thought suppression can cause much more sympathetic activation(heart rate increases more greatly).Secondly,when watching films,there was no difference on emotion between persons using the expressive suppression and natural watching persons.In other words,expressive regulation didn't result in decreasing of emotion.When watching positive film,persons using the thought suppression strategy experienced less positive emotion than natural watching persons.In other words,expressive regulation resulted in decreasing of positive emotion.Thirdly,the introvert are apt to use expressive suppression and thought suppression strategies,and they have more psychological problems;extravert use expressive suppression and thought suppression less than introverted person,and they also have less psychological problems.Expressive suppression and thought suppression perform the mediating functions between introversion,extraversion and adaptation.