358 - Managing Emotions and Expressive Suppression

Full transcript available

Expressive suppression 101

Expressive suppression is a term referring to the intentional masking of outward signs of an underlying emotion. Usually, it’s studied in terms of facial expressions, but also sometimes includes involuntary emotional giveaways such as laughter. The concept also overlaps with a couple others: masking and display rules.

Display rules are about how we both diminish and amplify or modify certain emotional expressions to fit in with our culture, both at macro and micro levels. Display rules could be considered an umbrella that both masking and expressive suppression fit under.

When considering the research done on expressive suppression, it’s important to know that some people regard expressive suppression as involuntary, or something that has been pushed on us through punishment of some kind. Being punished for expressing sadness, fear, or anger are some of the examples cited to be possible causes of expressive suppression. However, some other studies define expressive suppression as a conscious decision to limit one’s expressions.

Pros of expressive suppression

It’s not necessarily a bad thing! Behaviors like expressive suppression formed out of necessity. Some potential advantages include:

• Self-protection, such as hiding anger at your parents or boss, or avoiding showing fear when public speaking.

• Social purposes, like avoiding laughing at someone when they hurt themself because you don’t want to hurt their feelings or embarrass them, or avoiding reacting to something horrible a relative says at dinner in order to avoid conflict or starting a fight.

• There is some evidence to suggest that suppressing the physical response to an emotion can also decrease the actual experience of that emotion, though unfortunately, that has been shown to be more effective at limiting positive emotions and less effective at limiting negative ones.

Cons of expressive suppression

Although not necessarily a bad thing, too much expressive suppression can greatly impact your relationships. For example:

• Suppression isn’t always 100% perfect. If someone catches us concealing our feelings, they may perceive that we are covering something more sinister or lose trust in us because they feel like we are trying to deceive them.

• In close relationships, hiding feelings is incredibly unhelpful. If our partner can’t tell what we’re feeling (or even worse, can tell we are hiding our feelings) then it is harder for us to be on the same team and help each other. It can also prevent building intimacy.

• Studies have shown that people who have recently done a large amount of expressive suppression actually have more difficulty making decisions, learning new things, and perform poorly on tests of executive function. The mental resources needed for these types of activities have already been taken up by suppressing expressions.

How to combat it

If you find yourself engaging in expressive suppression more often than you should, don’t beat yourself up about it. It’s something many of us struggle with! But some ways to combat the downsides of expressive suppression include:

• Counseling or therapy. This is particularly helpful when your expressive suppression may stem from fears or conditioning.

• Reappraisal, or changing how we think about a situation. For example: “In moments when I was upset, I have thought about what I could learn from this experience.”

• Antecedent-focused emotion regulation. This happens before a stressful or emotional event and refers to reframing or reappraising how you look at a situation as well, only it is done proactively.

Transcript

This document may contain small transcription errors. If you find one please let us know at info@multiamory.com and we will fix it ASAP.

Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory podcast, we're talking about emotional regulation and specifically something called expressive suppression. This is a particular way that we limit our emotional responses. It's incredibly common, it's something we learn growing up, but it can have pretty negative effects on our lives if it ends up being the dominant way that we manage our emotions. We're going to be diving into some of the research about that, some related ways of managing emotions. Then, as always, at the end we're going to talk about some techniques and some tools that you can apply to find perhaps slightly healthier ways of managing those expectations and those emotions.

Had the two of you ever heard of this before preparing for this?

Dedeker: Never in my life.

Emily: No, not specifically as it's said, expressive suppression, no.

Jase: I hadn't either, and I found an article unrelated to what we're going to be talking about in this that we're actually going to talk about in the bonus, but that's what turned me onto this concept. I was like, "What is this," and started looking into it more, had our researcher, Em, look into it, and together we put together this episode. Let's just start off with a definition. Just what is it? Expressive suppression is the term that refers to a reduction of facial expressions or other reactions like outward reactions to an emotion. To put it another way, it's the intentional masking of outward signs of an underlying emotion.

It's usually studied in regards to facial expressions but can sometimes involve other involuntary emotional giveaways, like if you're suppressing an urge to laugh or you're trying not to look scared or you're trying not to smile when you want to or not to look hurt when you feel that way, anything where you're trying to control any of those outward expressions. It's the expression of it, that's why it's expressive suppression.

Dedeker: That seems like a very human experience.

Jase: For sure. Absolutely.

Dedeker: Maybe I would argue maybe even universal.

Jase: It does seem to be. That's something to note in the research. It's not like it's not treated as some disorder or some maladaptive thing necessarily, it's more just like, "Yes, we all do this, this happens, but it can get out of hand and there may be better ways that we can handle things," but it is considered to be pretty universal. We learn this some more than others depending on how you were brought up and how your life has gone since then. We're continuing to learn this, it's not just something we get in childhood.

Emily: Just for clarification's sake, this expressive suppression concept, it overlaps but it's not completely the same as a couple of other concepts that you may have heard about and that one that we talked about on the show with Stevie Lang recently, which are masking and display rules. Masking as it is related to autistic and other neurodivergent people, it probably overlaps with this, but it may be more closely related to something called display rules.

While expressive suppression is about attempting to eliminate expressions of emotion, display rules are more about how we both diminish and amplify or modify certain emotional expressions to fit in with our culture, and that's macro culture and microculture. Just some examples, you may smile really big when you receive a gift that you don't like. You may actually like put on more of a show because you're trying to suppress that idea that like, "Ugh, this is not something that I really want, but thanks so much." Or you might act concerned when you really want to laugh and say I told you so to a person who just got--

Jase: Just get advice or something.

Emily: Yes or just got deceived by someone that you knew was a shithead or something like that. Again, it's over-emphasizing. That's my interpretation of it, over-emphasizing or changing or masking, essentially, an emotion.

Jase: The concepts all overlap with each other.

Emily: Yes, they do.

Dedeker: Yes. Especially the concept of display rules, it could be considered maybe the larger umbrella term under which things like masking or expressive suppression that we're going to focus on today. Those all fit under this bigger umbrella known as display rules. Another distinction that's not as clear in the research is that some people regard expressive suppression as being involuntary. In other words, it's something that's been drilled into us through punishment of some kind. For example, a common one when boys grow up, they're often shamed or punished for expressing sadness or fear.

Or other people might be punished for expressing anger, often this happens to girls growing up or, from what I've heard, also happened to young Jase growing up. Other studies seem to define expressive suppression as more of a conscious decision to limit those expressions. That is a little bit clear. There's a couple of different ways that the researchers view this.

Jase: Right. Originally it was explained to me that the difference between display rules and expressive suppression was that display rules is unconsciously choosing to diminish some expressions and emphasize others to fit in with my culture, and that expressive suppression is involuntary, I'm doing it unconsciously, but then the majority of the studies I came across and the way they talk about expressive suppression is both conscious and not conscious as a choice. I think that distinction is maybe not actually as accurate as I was originally led to believe.

Emily: That's like a chicken and an egg scenario a little bit. It's like which is conscious and which is unconscious. You know internally, "Oh crap. I don't really like this gift, but I don't want this person to know that, and so I'm going infuse this expression with something larger than maybe I would if I really liked the gift." It's like, is that involuntary? Is that voluntary? Maybe it's involuntary just because this is the culture in which you're brought up and culture tells us to do those things. I don't know. That's an interesting conundrum there.

Jase: Or if you do it enough, it becomes unconscious or something.

Emily: Involuntary, yes. Yes, exactly.

Jase: We are going to go on to look at some specific measures of expressive suppression, but before we do, just understanding the concept on the surface level right now, how expressively suppressive do you each think that you are?

Emily: I think I have a rubber face and sometimes that tends to show emotion a lot, but I just want to bring this up that in the context of the pandemic, especially at work, I feel like my ability to expressively suppress is heightened because I have a mask on. If somebody says something at work that's shitty, I can internally or even externally do something with my face under my mask with the lower half of my face, but nobody's going to see it anymore, which I appreciate, or I don't actually. There's something that turns on sometimes at work where I'm like, I have to smile at this person because that's the polite thing to do.

I don't have to do that as much because I have on a mask and I kind of like that. It takes away the bullshit a little bit more.

Jase: Yes.

Dedeker: Yes. That's fair, that's fair. What do you think, Jase?

Jase: When I was first looking into this, I feel like I'm somewhat higher on expressive suppression in terms of just not really outwardly expressing how I feel. I think once someone gets to know me really well, they can pick up on some more subtle cues, but I'd say for the most part, I think I'm fairly expressive suppressive, if that's the word for it. That's my guess, but we're going to get into more measures of it later. What about you, Deds?

Dedeker: Gosh, I think I grew up very expressively suppressive, however we want to call it.

Jase: Suppressant, I like that.

Dedeker: I think that I grew up very, very much learning to have a stone face or a freeze of mouths face. Sometimes I still go there. I don't know where I'm at now though because with my work, once I switched to working with clients, that really shook up a lot of things for me to a weird extent of needing to I think really express certain emotions.

Emily: Empathy.

Dedeker: Yes, definitely really attune with the client, but then there's other emotions, like the example that you gave about sometimes wanting to be like I told you so, but I can't do that, and so then I need to really suppress that one. I think it's a little bit all over the place.

Emily: I feel like I've seen you make this mm face. You're saying tell me more, but also maybe internally having a judgment call to a degree, which is fine, it's just interesting. I think that that's maybe a form of suppression expressively.

Dedeker: Then I think what throws all of this into wack is all three of us have acting and performance experience, and that I feel also makes things more confusing and maybe gives you more control of choosing when to be more expressive or choosing when not to be more expressive of the things that are going on under the surface.

Jase: I think in what you were talking about, Deds, you brought up an important part of this, and it's not that expressive suppression is just I don't show any emotions, it's that there might be a specific one that for you is often suppressed, or maybe certain set of ones, generally negative ones. Although sometimes it's like suppressing laughter at someone's misfortune or something like that too. That's very much it. I don't want people to misunderstand and think this means not showing any emotion or being like a Vulcan, being unemotional, it's more about there's specific ones that you learned at some point in your life were not okay to show.

Sometimes I think that could be useful, like walking into a job interview, you don't want to show how freaked out and nervous you are, but maybe there are better ways than expressive suppression. That's what we'll get into later and see if that might be the case.

Emily: We probably all have our own cognitive biases around how well or not well we expressively suppress, but now let's talk about a few ways in which we measure expressive suppression. There are a few different questionnaires that have been developed to determine levels of expressive suppression. Some people look at it as a trait and try to determine overall levels of suppression while others focus on more acute or situational forms of suppression. We may have certain social groups or areas of life where we experience less of a burden, less of a need to suppress our feelings, like when we're with close friends.

Then on the flip side, we may have other areas where we have to put way more of an effort into suppressing. That's something to think about regarding all of this.

Jase: Similarly, you could be going through a time in your life where you're having to suppress a lot of anger, regardless of who you're around. There's situational things there. There's basically two main questionnaires. There's one that's called the emotion regulation questionnaire or the ERQ. That one is about more studying it as a trait. It's asking questions more like I keep emotions to myself, agree or disagree. Let's see, I control my emotions by not expressing them.

It's like those sorts of questions more generally, but the one that I wanted us to look at right now that I thought was really interesting is called the burden of state emotion regulation questionnaire, which was created in 2015 by Franco and Suchy, I'm not quite sure how you say that name. Abbreviated to the B CIRC. Andy Serkis is the A CIRC, this is the B CIRC.

Emily: I like that, I like that a lot.

Jase: It consists of 14 questions. The difference with this one is that you answer each question twice. You answer it once saying thinking about the last two weeks except for the last 24 hours. Answer the question on a scale of zero being never, up through four being all the time. Then you answer it a second time just thinking about the last 24 hours. The point of this is you're looking at the last two weeks as a baseline, and then the last 24 hours of what's the acute, "How much have I just recently had to suppress my emotions?" I'll just read through these questions.

We don't have to go through and actually take this quiz right now, but just to give you a sense of what some of these questions would be, it's within the last two weeks, and then also within the last 24 hours, I've made sure not to show my positive emotions. I've made sure not to show my negative emotions. It's been difficult to maintain a neutral or pleasant facial expression. I have forced myself to respond politely. It's been difficult to maintain an even tone of voice. I have fought to hold back tears. I have worked hard not to say what I was really thinking.

I've remained silent in order to keep myself from an angry outburst or from saying something I didn't mean. I've worked hard to control, for example, impulses to throw or hit things. I've had to work hard to control or moderate my breathing. I've worked hard not to show I was scared. It has been difficult not to laugh out loud. I have worked hard not to make an inappropriate joke or comment. It has been difficult not to blurt out something I was excited about when it was inappropriate or would've interrupted someone else. That gives you a sense of these studies. This is what they're measuring, this is what they're looking at to determine if someone is experiencing the burden of expressive suppression specifically.

Emily: Interesting.

Dedeker: Again, a lot of these feel very human to me. I guess some of these, culturally, could be very different.

Jase: I was curious just from hearing those 14, how do we feel about it? Specifically, can you think of times in your life or groups of people that you've been around that you think you would've answered more or less on those? >Say you've been around that group in the last 24 hours, would that skew your answers higher or lower in terms of how much you did these things?

Emily: Like work-related situations, even sometimes with my voice teacher in the past, suppressing, holding back tears, things like that if I am in a particularly challenging moment with her, or things like that. Moderating breathing, those tend to come up more or neutral or pleasant facial expression, stuff like that. Or even tone of voice, although I'm pretty monochrom-- monotone in my voice.

Monochromatic.

Dedeker: Inmonochromatic. No color whatsoever.

Emily: Yes, I tend to be that, so that's not too difficult for me, but stuff like that whereas the throwing things or angry outbursts tend to be less of an issue for me. What about y'all?

Dedeker: Oh, gosh, I don't know. Right now I'm going through a time where I'm very stressful and there's a lot of emotions. I think my emotions are very heightened right now, and so I'm probably suppressing a little bit more than maybe I normally would, depending on the context. Like definitely in work situations for sure. A little bit around my family. I don't know, I think it's hard for-- Right now is not a good sample as far as thinking about my life in the average.

Jase: Keep that in mind actually because we're going to get to some stuff a little bit later in the second half of the episode that's specifically about studies showing what happens when you're more acutely under that burden of suppressing your expression of your emotions, which it sounds like, Dedeker, for you that's happening a lot right now just because there's a lot of emotions going on. Keep that in mind because that'll come up later when we're thinking about that study. For me, what comes up for this is definitely who I'm around. That thing of not only am I at work or not, but am I on video calls or are they just audio?

That burden of keeping things under control is greater when people can see your face. Then also thinking about for me being around family, whether it's my family or Dedeker's family or anyone else's family really, that there's a little bit of that extra burden of I can't just blow up and be like, "Could you stop talking about that same thing over and over again?" Or like, "Can we please stop talking about this ridiculous thing that you think is true that you read in the news?" Or whatever it is. Got a lot more suppression going on at those times.

Dedeker: We are going to talk about how there's both pros and cons to expressive suppression as well as some tools that we can use to make all this a little bit easier. First, we're going to take a break to talk about the ways that you can help support this show, listen to our sponsors. We really, really appreciate our sponsors for helping us to be able to keep producing this show, to be able to keep paying the people who help us make this show, and to keep delivering this show and this content to you for free. We're back. We're going to start out by talking about the potential advantages to expressive suppression.

Of course, the majority of the research out there tends to focus only on the negative effects, which we are going to look at a little bit later on. When it comes to the advantages that may come along with expressive suppression, it is a little tricky. On the one hand, we develop this ability to suppress our display of emotions for a reason. Clearly, there's a purpose. On the other hand, there could be more effective or healthier ways of regulating our emotions.

Emily: We were talking about display rules at the top of the episode and discussing the fact that we learn to suppress our expression of emotions for social purposes, for things like self-protective purposes. We're going to go into some examples of that. Self-protection, an example of that as it regards to expressive suppression, that can be something like hiding anger at your parents or your boss or avoiding showing fear when public speaking.

I always think about my mom talked about, she had to like give a humongous talk to 50,000 people and beamed to a bunch of different people at her work and she said that her knees were shaking but she was able to grab onto the thing in front of her and keep it together, but that it was very scary. She had to avoid showing fear to that. Also, examples of social purposes could be something like avoiding laughing at someone when they hurt themselves. Maybe if they do it in a silly-- I's a mean thing to do but if somebody just completely eats it, the immediate response is to laugh out loud but you don't want to hurt their feelings or embarrass them.

Or maybe avoiding reacting to something horrible a relative says at dinner in order to avoid conflict or start fighting. That can be laughing at the absurdity of something or wanting to immediately lash out and be like, "No, you're wrong."

Dedeker: Happens a lot of family gatherings in my experience.

Emily: Yes.

Jase: Yes.

Emily: Also there's some evidence to suggest that suppressing the physical response to an emotion can also decrease the actual experience of the emotion. I think we've talked about this before. Unfortunately, that has been shown to be more effective at limiting positive emotions and less effective at limiting negative ones, which is interesting.

Jase: If you're trying to suppress all of them, it's going to be a net loss for you it seems.

Emily: In terms of self-protection and just an advantage to expressive suppression, it comes out in the ways that we develop ourselves, especially in childhood but really throughout our lives. We're just working to find this balance between complete suppression of our emotions and total expression of our emotions. We're trying to find the middle path, as we like to say on this show, but it can be more challenging for some people and just challenging in general regardless of whatever moment in time you're in.

Jase: Now we're going to switch gears and we're going to talk about some of the problems with expressive suppression, some of the downsides to it. There are a number of different, interesting ways in which this particular way of managing and regulating our emotions can cause us problems or inflict a social cost. We're going to look at some of those, and then at the end of the episode, we're going to look at a couple of ways we can help mitigate these challenges. The first one here is the fact that suppressing an emotion, just trying to eliminate its expression, the danger there is if you don't succeed.

Emily: Try, try again, Jase.

Jase: Well, okay, yes. If you're not 100% perfect at it and someone catches you concealing a feeling, that could lead them to perceive that you're covering up something maybe even more sinister than your actual feeling was or maybe lose trust in you because it's like, "Oh, this person's being dishonest with me." If we are trying to suppress things all the time, that can have this negative social cost for us because you're not going to be perfect all the time.

Emily: When a teacher is like, "Is something funny Mr. Lindgren?" Or something like that.

Jase: Exactly.

Emily: You're like, "Sorry. I was just trying not to laugh at your absurd statement."

Dedeker: Another downside is the cost to our relationships. I think this is a huge one because making yourself harder to read and making your emotions harder to read isn't always a good thing. Of course, it can help us. Again, if your partner shares something with you that's very vulnerable that you actually are very judgmental of or think is funny or whatever that maybe that it can be helpful to just tamp down your emotions and more be there to empathize with your partner and have their back. In most cases in close relationships, just suppressing your expression of your emotions is actually unhelpful.

If your partner can't tell what you're feeling, or even worse, like Jase mentioned, can tell that you're hiding your feelings, it's a lot harder to be on the same team and to help each other. Generally, it can prevent just building intimacy and trust if you're unreadable or if you come across as cold. Men, in particular, have been found to have higher degrees of expressive suppression in general, which can also show up in a destructive way in relationships. That could be a whole other episode, but I think it's fairly common knowledge about the way that we socialize men and boys to not show emotions other than maybe anger.

Maybe anger's okay, but everything else you got to keep under wraps. There's a recent study in 2021 from the University of Auckland which set out to examine specifically how expressive suppression affected couples. They studied 427 heterosexual couples via a survey to determine each partner's level of expressive suppression and also each partner's level of relationship satisfaction. Now you could probably make some guesses as to what they found. What would be your guess?

Emily: Is it high levels of expressive suppression equal less satisfaction?

Dedeker: Bingo. They also found that even if only partner was high in expressive suppression, that both partners reported feeling lower levels of satisfaction. Even if there's just one of you in the relationship that frequently tamps down expression of emotions, it bleeds over onto both of you as far as relationship satisfaction is concerned.

Emily: That's really interesting. Now we're going to talk about the cost to executive functioning and learning. We're going to talk about the tests that we mentioned earlier which is the burden of state emotion regulation questionnaire. That's a mouthful.

Dedeker: yeah, the BSERQ

Jase: The BSERQ.

Emily: Yeah, the BSERQ that we talked about. The budget Andy Serkis that we talked about at the beginning. This has been used along with tests of executive functioning and learning among various age groups. Essentially, the studies would look at how high a person's burden of regulating their emotions has been in the last 24 hours and then see if that had any connection to how well they would perform on tasks that involved things like learning a sequence of movements or solving a problem or creative thinking or decision making.

Jase: Or like learning how to manipulate objects in a certain way, like how to operate a new device or something like that.

Emily: Across all age groups, there seems to be a pretty clear correlation that having done more expressive suppression in the past 24 hours negatively affects performance in those tests of executive functioning and sequencing learning. That's really interesting, wow.

Jase: Yes, that's big.

Emily: Just if you're suppressing it, I wonder if it kind of dials down a part of your brain that allows you to do other things. I don't know. I wonder why that would be. That's fascinating.

Jase: Yes. Like Dedeker was saying, she's in a really emotional time right now and she's probably doing more of this expressive suppression, especially when out in public or around other people, things like that, or if you had to spend a lot of time around family where you really had to bite your tongue a lot. Then imagine in that situation being asked to make some decisions or decide on a plan for how to do something or any of those things that fall under that umbrella of executive function, which is like prioritizing, making decisions, making a plan, evaluating things, that kind of stuff, that you're just like, "I just can't. That's too much right now. Can you ask me later?" Have you ever had that feeling?

Emily: Sure.

Dedeker: I think that's been your experience of me recently, Jase. Just even tiny decisions, I'm just like, "Uh, uh, uh, uh."

Emily: Even if you're at a really high-level job and have to oversee a bunch of people and bite your tongue at people coming to you with their problems and stuff and then you come home to a partner and they talk to you about their problems, you might be less able to be as empathetic and kind and loving. You may even get a little annoyed with them because you've spent so much time suppressing your emotions. It's kind of bottling up and coming out in a bad time potentially. That makes a lot of sense.

One of the common explanations is essentially that it takes a lot of mental effort to suppress the expression of our emotions and that leaves fewer mental resources for other things, especially the ones that involve many areas of the brain. Other psychologists have mentioned that while we're focusing on suppressing or modulating our emotions, we're less able to pay attention to others or to do social interactions, which may cause its own problem. That's exactly what we were talking about.

Jase: Yes. Now, I know everyone's like, "Oh, gosh. I do this thing, it's causing me some problems. What can I do about this? What are some things that I can do?" The first one here, and I know this comes up a lot but it's getting some kind of counseling or some kind of therapy. This is particularly useful if through this episode you maybe started to think, "Huh, I was someone who was raised in a household where I couldn't really express feelings without being punished for that in some way, being scolded for it or being dismissed for it or made fun of for it," or something like that.

I'm noticing that that now shows up in my relationships, that I want to trust my partner and express myself, but it's hard to even go there. This is something that for me actually, around the time that I met Emily, I had a much harder time with that. For me actually, it was during an acting class. In addition, I'd done some other therapy and coaching and stuff before that, but this particular acting class was almost like a meditation class in a way. It's Steve Eastin, we've talked about him before.

Emily: Love you, Steve.

Jase: It was just about learning how to experience and feel the feelings that just happen rather than an acting class that's about manufacturing a feeling or simulating a feeling, which essentially is more of these display rules and expressive suppression. Instead, it was just about getting out of the way and feeling things. For me, it was a big year of really learning to feel all of a sudden, which was kind of a big deal, but it made a huge difference in my relationships and my quality of life in general. If you feel like it's something that is more of a trait or a chronic thing, and not just recently I've got something going on, then some counseling, therapy, a coach can be really helpful.

If this shows up with your partner, doing some of that potentially with your partner or at least being aware of them in that process and helping to build for yourself some trust that you can bring these things to your partner and not be rejected or punished for it like you may have been trained to think that you would. With all of that said, it is important to keep in mind that, one, if you actually aren't safe to express your emotions with your partner, that's a different problem and that is something concerning, and hopefully your therapist or social worker or counselor or coach can help you be aware of that and find some ways to either change that or to get out of that relationship.

Then, on the other side, when you're going through this, it's important to keep in mind that there's a difference between expressing an emotion in an honest and safe way and expressing an emotion in a way that can be legitimately frightening, harmful, or dangerous to others. Such as expressing your anger versus expressing your anger by throwing things or being physically threatening or something like that. This isn't to say that, "Oh, well, my partner complains when I throw things across the room when I'm angry. I'm being expressively suppressed."

It's not quite-- That's crossing another line. Again, some therapy and counseling to help find some other techniques and tools for expressing that would be really helpful.

Dedeker: Something else that we can do is known as reappraisal. We've touched on reappraisal a couple of times. It pops up in various different studies. I have a quote here from a research study from 2019 that was published by the Public Library of Science. The study is called Emotionally intelligent people reappraise rather than suppress their emotions. Quote, "Compared with people who tend to suppress their emotions, people who use reappraisal strategies more frequently experience more positive and less negative emotions.

They're more successful at mood repair, have better social relationships, better psychological health, suffer depressive symptoms less frequently, and show greater self-esteem and life satisfaction. Here's some examples of what reappraisal can look like. When I want to feel more positive emotion, like more joy or more amusement, I change what I'm thinking about. Or when I want to feel less negative emotions, such as less sadness, less anger, then I change what I'm thinking about. For instance, when I'm faced with a stressful situation I make myself think about it in a way that helps me stay calm.

Or similarly, when I want to feel more positive emotion, I change the way that I'm thinking about the situation, or I control my emotions by changing the way that I think about the situation that I'm in." I think this is sometimes called reframing as well.

Jase: Yes, absolutely. Reframing is just another term for reappraisal. From what I gather, reappraisal is the more psychological study word for it, and reframing is a little bit more the pop psychology term for it, but they're effectively the same thing, is finding different ways to think about a thing rather than just trying to force yourself to feel a different way.

Emily: Another example of reappraisal is, "In moments when I was upset, I have thought about what I could learn from this experience. Also, when I felt challenged, I have considered that it will make me a stronger person." I like that one. "I have tried to look on the bright side of moments when I was upset." That's easier said than done sometimes. "When something went wrong, I thought that it all could've been much worse. In a situation I found upsetting, I have thought that it is nothing compared with problems other people face." Ugh, I have that a lot. I wonder, is that healthy? I don't know.

Dedeker: I think reappraisal, like many tools, could be used for good or used for evil. This reappraisal of comparing your pain and suffering to other people's pain and suffering and coming to the conclusion of how other people have it much worse or the situation could be much worse, that could be used for good in helping your emotion to feel less intense in that particular moment, or it could be used for evil in that it could be self-shaming. It could be even more suppressing. "I'm so terrible," or, "Oh, I really shouldn't be feeling anything at all about this because other people have it worse."

I think, with a lot of these things, have to take it with a grain of salt. Ultimately, it's for the purpose of helping you to feel better and be more in touch with your emotions and feeling the way that you want to feel.

Jase: This next one is related to that, which is, "When faced with a problem I found difficult, I've thought that it wasn't too bad compared to other things that I've gone through." That's interesting. Rather than comparing yourself to other people, it's trying to put things in perspective for yourself. Like, "This sucks and it's hard, but I know I've gotten through things that are harder and I came out the other side of them." Just trying to get that perspective. This is something that Dedeker and I've been talking about a lot recently.

Emily: Then also when I felt down, I tell myself that things will get better in a little while because things aren't always going to stay shitty. It'll probably be better eventually. That's a nice reminder for oneself.

Jase: I think the point of all of these, going through this list, and if you look up reappraisal techniques or reframing techniques, something like that, you'll find other ones that maybe would resonate with you more. These examples are fairly simple, on the nose, there's no trickery to them. It's just like, "I just thought about something else," or, "I just thought about it different," or, "I just put it in perspective."

I think the point of this list more is to give you a sense of what reappraisal is and, I guess, just how significant some of those findings were from that study, that it would help with better social relationships and psychological health, and that a lot of the negatives that come with expressive suppression are not there when you're using reappraisal. This comes back to the question that Dedeker asked earlier in the episode about how much do we feel we do this expressive suppression thing. When I started working on this episode. I was like, "Gosh, I think I'm fairly high on this of trying to really keep things under control and not offend people and not let people know if I'm upset or I'm angry, or whatever."

Then, as I read through this about reappraisal, I was like, "There are some areas where I do think I've moved more into reappraisal as ways of managing and controlling those emotions as opposed to suppressing them." I think that fine line, that distinction there is worth noting. I was thinking about a situation. You imagine that something's happening at work or at home that is frustrating and upsetting to you. The expressive suppression way of handling that is like, "I'm so angry and I can't show it. I got to keep it together. I got to just keep it in.

I'm so angry, though. I got to keep it inside." Then the reappraisal way is like, "Gosh, I'm so angry. I know I've been through things that are worse than this, it's probably going to get better because it's temporary," or, "I know I'm going to talk about this at our next radar, and we'll be able to handle it when I'm more calm, and I know I'll be more calm because I've been through this before, and now I feel a little bit better." I've achieved effectively the same result of not ending up being angry and blowing up, but I've done it in a way that's actually changed how I'm thinking and feeling as opposed to just focusing on, "I just got to keep it inside. I just got to suppress."

Once I realized that distinction, I was like, "Huh, yes, okay. I don't think I'm quite as bad on this as I thought I was." Again, I used to be much worse and have done a lot of work on it. I thought that was worth noting there.

Dedeker: I think that's a good distinction to make.

Emily: Yes.

Jase: Then our last tool here is related to reframing or reappraisal, and that is called antecedent-focused emotion regulation.

Dedeker: It sounds exciting.

Jase: Sounds exciting and sciencey, right?

Dedeker: Yes,

Jase: Essentially the whole antecedent-focused is about being before the thing happens. That's really all it means, is it has to do with managing your emotions before the stressful thing happens or before the upsetting thing happens. You're not always going to be able to do this because sometimes things come along that we didn't expect, but some examples of this would be like I have an upcoming task that I'm really stressed about and I'm worried what if I screw this up and I get fired from my job and all my partners leave me and everyone stops listening to Multiamory and it's terrible.

Emily: This reminds me of the last episode we did.

Jase: I know. It's so to reassess and reframe that as a challenge rather than a threat. It's kind of get more into the like, "Oh, yes, I'll really prove myself with this," rather than, "Oh gosh, I hope I don't screw it up." Again, to go back to our acting teacher that Emily and I had, he would always say so many actors go into auditions trying not to lose the part, when really you want to go in to win the part. That's what makes the difference between a performance that's really interesting and inspired and one that's super safe, cautious, and boring. Another one would be if you're nervous going into a medical procedure like surgery would be to focus more on--

Emily: My wisdom teeth taken out.

Jase: That's a good example.

Dedeker: She was such a champ with that though.

Emily: No, I was not. I was bitching and moaning the entire-- And just internally, I was so scared because that was the first time I ever went all the way under anesthesia. I had some really impacted wisdom teeth at 29 years old, getting them taken out. Yes, it was a rough time.

Jase: The example here would be leading up to that, trying to put more of your mental focus on the reason for it and the positive outcomes that will come at the end of it, rather than the pain.

Emily: I was able to get Invisalign afterwards, which was awesome.

Jase: Okay, sure. For my mom, this was a big one when she was getting her second knee replaced was that, "I really don't want to go through this recovery process again because I know how much it sucked before, but also--" She would kind of reframe it, "But also, that knee hurts so much less than this one does." So being able to focus on, "I know this is going to be worth it because I'm going to feel so much better eventually, even if I'm going to have to go through a hard time in the middle." Then another one would be something like reframing nervousness as excitement.

I'm going into this job interview, I'm really nervous. Reframing it for yourself as, "I'm really excited for the chance." Just those little things, but to do them in advance. It's kind of like reappraisal, but doing it in advance wherever possible. I could even see this with family gatherings, before going to the family, gathering, taking some moments to think about this is an opportunity for me to just learn how other people think and know that I don't need to change their minds. That's not going to happen, so I don't even need to try.

Emily: That's a lovely way of putting it.

Dedeker: That's a nice one. Yes, that's a nice one. If you're someone who feels like you might be high in suppressive expression, don't beat yourself up about it. We can relate. As we've reiterated many times in this episode, this is a very normal human thing. There may be situations where you literally have no choice, that this is how you get through the day or how you get through being at work or how you get through being around your family. Hopefully, the information in this episode helps you better understand yourself and maybe give some insight as to why you may have learned for good reason to regulate your emotions in this way.

As always, knowledge is power. It allows us to take proactive steps to make changes if we want to, it helps give us some more insight, it helps give you something also if this is something that you relate to and you're like, "Oh gosh, I think I'm actually high in this," that this is a wonderful topic of conversation with a potential partner or a friend or someone that you're close to to bring them into understanding you a little bit better.

Jase: Yes. Through all that, just be compassionate with yourself. Thank yourself for learning this important ability, realize that you learned it because it protected you and it kept you safe and that's great. Thank it for that. Then also look to some ways that you might be able to learn more effective and healthier tools like reappraisal and antecedent-focused emotion regulation. If you want to sound real fancy, you can memorize that and whip it out. Be like, "Oh, I'm working on some antecedent-focused emotion regulation. Don't worry about it. Science."

Doing some therapy, looking into online resources for reappraisal, reframing, things like that to help improve your communication and your wellbeing. For our bonus, we are going to talk about the article that first turned me onto this whole concept, which is a potential positive connection between expressive suppression and avoiding procrastination. We're going to get into that and see some interesting research there. But in the meantime, we would love to hear from you on Instagram or posting on our stories there our question of the week which is, when do you notice yourself regulating or suppressing your emotions?