Human behavior is a direct consequence of emotions, with the emotions directly affecting perception, cognition, personality system, body language, and the mind.
Although most of us think that feelings are deeply personal and private experiences, this seminar explores the social side of emotion¿including how they are socially learned, shaped, regulated, and distributed in the population as well as the consequences of emotion culture, emotion norms, emotional labor, and emotional deviance for individuals and society.
In summary, the present study adds to the existing normative literature on emotion regulation by showing that the longer-term consequences of emotion suppression are an ongoing dampening of reactivity (reduced emotional response to positive material, reduced memory of the material encoded, and greater likelihood of experiencing no intrusions about the memory encoded).
For example, an interesting future study will be to contrast the consequences of emotion suppression in the same depressed individuals when they are in episode and recovered to test this possibility.
Overall, counter to heuristic beliefs promoting acceptance and discouraging emotion suppression in the clinical literature (e.g ACT; Hayes et al., 2004; DBT; Linehan, 1993; MBCT; Segal et al., 2001), these results generally found no clear 'rebound' consequences of emotion suppression within a healthy population.
To date, while there has been extensive laboratory investigation of the consequences of suppression of cognitive mental material (e.g. thoughts and memories; Anderson et al., 2004; Dalgleish & Yiend, 2006; Wegner et al., 1987), there has been surprisingly little well controlled laboratory work on the consequences of emotion suppression (Campbell-Sills, Barlow, Brown, & Hofmann, 2006).
Rather than globally discouraging the use of suppression, it may be helpful to carry out a cost-benefits analysis with each individual client for each specific situation and set up behavioural experiments (Bennett-Levy et al., 2004) to examine the consequences of emotion suppression.
This model delineates abilities that include (a) perceiving, appraising, and expressing emotions, (b) using emotions to facilitate thinking, (c) understanding the antecedents and consequences of emotions, and (d) regulating emotions in self and others, abilities that more recently have been aggregated in the term "emotional competence" (Denham 1998; Denham et al. 2011).
Causal talk about emotions, referred to in some studies as emotion cause talk (Brown and Dunn 1996; Salmon et al. 2013), is commonly broken down into three categories: unelaborated comments about emotions; explanations of the causes and consequences of emotions; and empathy-related statements (Dunn and Brown 1993).
Relevant evidence about the consequences of emotion-, rathan than thought-, suppression can be found in the clinical domain.
