Gender differences in the physiological effects of emotional regulation

ABSTRACT

Previous research has established that emotional regulation impacts our health; emotional expression is associated with a host of psychological and physiological benefits whereas emotional suppression has negative health consequences. Given that emotional-display rules restrict the range of emotion that men feel comfortable expressing, we hypothesized that gender might moderate the health outcomes associated with emotional regulation strategies. In a laboratory experiment, we instructed participants to either suppress or express their feelings in an interview with a researcher about a film they had watched. These participants provided saliva samples at four different points during the procedure for the later determination of cortisol. A Mixed Model ANOVA revealed that participant gender moderated the effect of emotional regulation strategy on cortisol. Contrary to the health consequences typically associated with emotional regulation strategies, men benefited more from emotional suppression than they did from emotional expression. These findings have important implications for future research and clinical work.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotional regulation
• cortisol
• gender
• gender-related display rules

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data Availability Statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/cmg7v/

Open scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data and Open Materials through Open Practices Disclosure. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://osf.io/cmg7v/.

Notes

1. The measures used in these packets are not relevant to the current study and were largely included to standardize the time between the saliva samples. You can see our supplemental materials for a full list of measures included in the study.

2. Because Mendes and colleagues find the gender of the person you are disclosing emotion to has an effect on physiological responses to emotional expression (Mendes et al., 2003), we ran our analysis including experimenter gender as a moderator. We do not find a moderating effect of experimenter gender, potentially because our sample was underpowered for this analysis. For our full results, see our supplemental materials.

3. At the request of a reviewer, we ran our analysis controlling for race/ethnicity. Race/ethnicity was not a significant control variable. Further, when we added race/ethnicity to our models, the pattern of results remained the same.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by internal grants awarded to the senior author.

Notes on contributors

Aaron J. Mink

Aaron J. Mink is currently completed a Master in Counseling at St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas.

MacKenzie M. Maddox

Aaron J. Mink is currently completed a Master in Counseling at St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas.

MacKenzie M. Maddox is a graduate student in the Clinical Psychology doctoral program at Temple University. Her research examines the relationship between circadian biology and bipolar spectrum disorders.

Athena J. Z. Pinero

Athena J. Z. Pinero is a graduate of Southwestern university; her reserach interests lie in the study of BIPOC and/or LGBTQ+ relationships.

Erin E. Crockett

Erin E. Crockett is Professor of Psychology at Southwestern University. Her research examines the associations between close relationships and health outcomes.