Motivation and emotion/Book/2015/Suppression of benevolent emotion/The social consequences of suppressing emotion

An In-depth look at a study:
In a study conducted by Butler,Egloff, Whlehelm, Smith, Erickson, Gross (2003) the researchers sought to find the social consequences of suppression. They sought to understand if expressive suppression lead to decrease rapport, a decrease in willingness to affiliate and increased physiological responding for the partners of the person suppressing the emotion.
 * The Social Consequences of Expressive Suppression

They set out to test this hypothesis by looking at interactions between two strangers, with one person being asked to suppress their emotions during the conversation. They firstly insured that both participants did not know one another, they were then hooked up to blood pressure cuffs and were then told that the researchers were looking at trying to better understand conversational process and that their conversation would be video taped.

To get a baseline negative emotion experience, participants were shown a documentary of a war film, which has previously revealed in pilot testing feelings of disgust, anger and sadness would be displayed. Random assignment then took place with participants either being placed in control, reappraisal or suppression groups. Conversation then began, The suppression participant received a tape-recording which said “During the conversation, behave in such a way that your partner does not know you are feeling any emotions at all”. The reappraisal participant was asked to “During the conversation, think about your situation in such a way that you remain calm and dispassionate”. While these participants were receiving this information their partners and the control group listen to music.

After this instructions or music was played all participants were asked to discuss the previous film. After this process was complete participants were asked to respond to the self report measures (Measures of rapport, emotion experience, task difficulty and distractions).

Researchers then filtered through the video footage, with which they used the SPAFF, Special Affect Coding System which focused on emotional expressive behaviour and responsiveness and all communication signals were taken into account, and positive, negative and neutral expression were coded (Gottman & levenson, 1992). In combination with the SPAFF, the researchers wanted to look at non responses, they used measures created by Davis (1982) which monitored responses and or lack of, as conversation lengths varied, the number of positive or negative responses were divided by utterances. Participants were also asked at the end of the experiment how they felt about their partner, including if they would like to continue a friendship or whether they thought their partner liked them.

The results indicated that participants regulating emotion had far less expression of any emotion between partners compared to the control, which supported the theory of this chapter and their hypothesis. The results also showed, that the suppressors in effort to suppress information became very distracted during the conversation. In conjunction the study also showed higher negative emotion or less of a want to affiliate, then positive in comparison to control. The investigation also found support for the theory that the suppressor and the partner of the suppressor had higher blood pressure, to the controls and were less expressive of negative emotion then the control.Their findings also suggested that the partners of suppressors were less willing to want to enter into friendships compared to the controls.

The researchers concluded that the use of suppression may have implications because they limit the forming of new friendships and have adverse effects on conversation, affiliation and rapport.

Relevance to our chapter: Although this research focused on the discussion of a movie, rather then benevolent interpersonal feelings, the research showcases that suppressing emotions has repercussion on the individual and the partner, even in laboratory settings, and if people are having these effects from the discussion of movie, the potential effects could be just as significant as the research suggests when people suppress benevolent interpersonal feelings. See Main page Suppression of Emotion for references

Butler, E. A., Lee, T. L., & Gross, J. J.(2007). Emotion regulation and culture: Are the social consequences of emotion suppression culture-specific? Emotion, 7(1),30-48. doi:10.1037/1528-3542.7.1.30

Butler, E. A., Egloff, B., Wlhelm, F. H., Smith, N.C., Erickson, E. A., & Gross, J. J. (2003).The social consequences of expressive suppression.  Emotion , 3(1), 48-67. doi:10.1037/1528-3542.3.1.48

Davis, D. (1982). Determinants of responsiveness in dyadic interactions. In W. Ickes & E. G. Knowles (Eds.),  Personality, roles and social behavior  (pp. 85–140). NewYork:        Springer-Verlag.