Studying The Facial Affect Sensitivity Difference Between High Well-being Individuals And Low Well-being Individuals

In a broader sense, the concept of well-being includes subjective well-being,objective well-being and psychological well-being. Subjective well-being is the most used well-being concept, and it includes two components. Cognitive component refers to life satisfaction and affective component refers to affective balance(i.e positive and negative affects). Subjective well-being has influence over individual psychological status and function. Emotion regulation is associated with well-being. Expressive suppression is one of the most used emotion regulation strategy. It is a response-focused regulation that aims at reducing emotion through suppress one’s expression and behavior. Yet, it is associated with negative outcomes according to numerous studies. It decreases positive emotion and subjective well-being, increasing negative feelings. Also, people with lower subjective well-being are more likely to use suppression. According to existing research, when recognizing other person’s facial expression, individual using suppression would lower their facial affect sensitivity,which refers to the ability of fast and accurate recognizing others’ facial affective expression. Facial affect sensitivity includes two indices—accuracy and speed.Accuracy refers to the accurate recognition of different facial expressions, and speed refers to accurate recognition of one facial affect differs in intensity. In a word,high sensitivity represents quick and accurate recognition of less intense facial expression.Low sensitivity needs more intense facial expression to recognize the affect.Researchers indicated that, by occupying cognitive resources and reducing proprioceptive feedback, expressive suppression reduces the facial affect sensitivity.Based on preceding studies, we predict that people with lower subjective well-being would have lower facial affect sensitivity because they tend to use expressivesuppression, which, in turn, would lower their facial affect sensitivity. Experimental method is used to assess our proposition. In study 1, DES-IV was used to select subjects. Those who scored higher than 73% participants and lower than 27%participant were selected into high well-being group and low well-being group. The purposes of study 1 is to assess whether(1) the sensitivity of high well-being group is superior to that of low well-being group when judging happy, angry, sad and fearful facial expression; and(2) low well-being subjects are more inclined to use expressive suppression compared with high well-being subjects. Results showed that there is no significant difference between high and low well-being group when recognizing 100%intense facial expression in four types of facial expression. However, when viewing50% intense facial expression, low well-being group recognized angry and sad face more accurately. There is no group difference on preference of expressive suppression.Study 2 used the same method to select subjects. The aims of this study is to find out(1) if low well-being subjects recognize facial affect more slowly than high well-being subjects, which means they need more intense facial expression to recognize the affect compared with their high well-being peers; and(2) if there is a group difference on preference of expressive suppression. Results showed that, compared with their more satisfied peers, low well-being subjects recognized sad face significantly faster. They recognized the affect at less intense stage. Also, in final judgement, they recognized fearful face more accurately. As same as in study 1, there is no group difference on preference of expressive suppression. Combined together, our results indicate that there is no group difference on the preference of suppression. Meanwhile, our results indicate that less satisfied subjects are more sensitive than satisfied subjects when recognizing negative faces. We suggest that culture influence is the reason why two groups did not differ in use of expressive suppression. Suppression suits the needs of Chinese culture, which required interpersonal harmony. And it effectively moderates Chinese people’s emotions. Thus, culture influence reduces the negative relationship between well-being and expressive suppression. Regarding facial affect sensitivity,attentive bias related to well-being might be the most reasonable explanation for our results. Existing research showed that emotions play a role in the process of selecting stimulus. People are more included to notice stimulus correlated to their present affect,and they notice these stimulus faster. Life satisfaction influence the selecting process as well. Thus, low well-being results in the enhanced facial affect sensitivity toward negative faces among low well-being individuals. Meanwhile, some researcherssuggested that attentive bias might precede estimation of well-being. Existing pessimistic tendency not only leads to high sensitivity of negative stimulus, but also the low satisfaction. Further, we discuss the relationship between expressive suppression and well-being in Chinese culture background and the effects of suppression towards Chinese. Present study is the first research attempting to examining the difference of facial affect sensitivity between high and low well-being subjects. We also discuss the possible influence of interdependent(vs independent)self-construct and interpersonal relationship on affecting the outcomes and preference of expressive suppression in Chinese population. Future research implications for well-being and emotion regulation are included.