Sex Roles Modulate Regulating Negative Emotion

Emotional regulation mostly occurs in social interaction situations,and is modulated by social and cultural contextual factors.Behavioral studies have found that there were gender differences in individual habitual emotion regulation,showing that men are more accustomed to using the expressive suppression than women,and there was no significant gender differences in the use of cognitive reappraisal.Evidences of cognitive neuroscience research suggests that men are superior to females in terms of expressive suppression and cognitive reappraisal,and there are gender differences in brain networks associated with regulatory strategies;however,the behavioral evidences did not show significant gender differences.Although such studies interpret gender differences in emotional suppression and regulation in a gender role perspective,the impact of gender role factors on emotional regulation was not directly explored.The gender role is a set of behavioral norms and personality traits that are obtained by the individual in the process of socialization through social learning.The gender role encourages and restricts the individual's ability to express and regulate emotions in a particular context.Thus the internalization of gender roles may affect the choice of emotional regulation strategies.Although the society better encourages men to suppress emotions,and that women are more emotionally expressive,but the individual's sex does not correspond to the gender role one by one.The impact of sex on the regulatory effect of expressive suppression may be modulated by gender roles.Meanwhile,as the study of gender differences in emotion regulation has not been conclusive,it is necessary to examine the impact of gender and gender role factors simultaneously.Expressive suppression is a typical form of response-focused regulatory strategies,which occurs after the emotional response is fully produced.Cognitive reappraisal occurs before the emotional response is fully activated,which is a typical form of antecedent-based regulatory strategies.There are big differences between the two regulatory strategies in terms of processes,neural mechanisms,and psychological adaptability.In this study,we first examine whether expressive suppression is affected both by gender and gender roles.We then examine whether cognitive reappraisal is influenced by gender roles.In addition,previous studies have found that androgynous individuals have a high level of social adaptability,so the study also examines the regulatory effects of bisexual individuals in use of the two strategies.In the first study,three groups of subjects were screened through the Chinese Sex Role Inventory(CSRI): masculine,feminine and androgyny.Subjects performed picture viewing tasks based on three types of instruction(negative free view,neutral free view,and expressive suppression).It was found that the effect of expressive suppression on LPP amplitude was influenced by gender and gender roles.In the use of the expressive suppression strategy,the amplitude of LPP induced by the negative stimuli was significantly reduced and the effect continued to the late stage of LPP.However,the emotional intensity score was not significantly reduced in all groups after the use of expressive suppression.In addition,for the androgynous individuals,there was no significant difference in the amplitude of the LPP induced by the negative stimuli between the neutral condition in the late stage,indicating that the negative emotional arousal level elicited by negative stimuli was recovered earlier.The results showed that the real-time regulatory effect of expressive suppression was affected by the interaction between gender and gender roles,and the regulatory effect of expressive suppression of typical female was more favorable.The research paradigm of study 2 is similar to that of study 1.In the condition of cognitive reappraisal,subjects were instructed to watch negative pictures and reappraisal the stimuli.The results showed that the LPP amplitude induced by negative pictures was significantly lower in the late stage of LPP in the masculine and feminine groups,but not in the androgynous group.Although there were no significant differences in the regulatory effect between masculine and feminine groups,they were significantly higher than those in the androgynous group.In addition,the intensity of emotional experience was significantly reduced after the use of cognitive reappraisal,but there were no differences between groups.In line with the study 1,the androgynous individuals showed a significant reduction in the LPP amplitude at a later stage when viewing negative stimuli.The results showed that the regulatory effect of of reappraisal of masculine and feminine individuals was more pronounced than that of androgynous individuals,but there were no differences between them.Based on the two studies,we found that the regulatory effect of expressive suppression was influenced by gender and gender roles,while the effect of cognitive reappraisal was only modulated by gender roles.Consistent with previous studies,the regulatory effect of cognitive reappraisal is more efficient than expressive suppression.Since changing the perspective or attitude of emotional events is more a way of self-regulation which is less impacted by social and cultural factors,thus there is no significant difference between masculine and feminine gender roles.Finally,the early recovery of the negative emotions of the androgynous individuals may indicate a high degree of automatic emotional regulation and a higher level of psychological adaptability.