Experiential versus Expressive Emotion Regulatory Skills: Are they different and which predicts health outcomes?

Abstract

The notion that patterns of emotion regulation have implications for physical health has a long history. Currently, the dominant view in this area suggests that cognitive reappraisal, a form of experiential regulation, is typically good for health whereas suppression, a form of expressive regulation, is typically deleterious (John & Gross, 2004). However, the evidence seen as consistent with these claims is undermined by several limitations and is theoretically problematic. Early evidence using objective, skill-based measures have linked reappraisal and expressive abilities to better outcomes (e.g., Demaree, Robinson, Erik, Everhart, & Schmeichel, 2004; Tuck, Adams, & Consedine, 2017). However, studies have only examined expressive and experiential skills in isolation, have not tested whether they are distinct capacities, assessed links to general cognitive capacities, or evaluate which skill is a better predictor of health outcomes. In testing these issues, 91 participants were recruited via staff mailing lists, posters, and word of mouth. After completing a baseline questionnaire assessing subjective health, symptoms, exercise, and healthcare utilisation, participants attended a laboratory session where they completed three tasks assessing (1) expressive ability, (2) working memory capacity (O-SPAN task), and (3) reappraisal ability, while heart rate variability was simultaneously measured. For the expressive task, participants were asked to pose an expression of five emotions (each presented five times) before taking a photograph. Images were scored for accuracy and intensity using FaceReader. The reappraisal task used a standardised paradigm to assess ability to reappraise disgust eliciting and neutral images. The thesis gives rise to two major groups of findings. First, in contrast to expectation, neither expressive nor experiential regulatory scores predicted working memory and these two emotion regulation skill constructs were not related to each other. Furthermore, although reliabilities within the five poses for each emotion were good (indicating that people are consistently better/worse at a given expression), associations across emotions were low. Taken as a whole, these data provide evidence of a differentiated structure to the ability elements of emotion regulation. Second, analyses showed that while experiential regulatory ability did not predict health outcomes, expressive skills did. Specifically, the ability to express positive emotions predicted better health outcomes whereas the ability to express negative emotions predicted worse. Overall, rather than supporting the view that one regulatory strategy is either necessarily good or bad, the current thesis suggests that the ability to flexibly regulate emotions in a manner that best fits with individual goals and environmental demands may be a more useful way in characterising adaptive emotion regulation.