Immediate and delayed effects of suppression and mindfulness as emotion regulation strategies*

ABSTRACT

Background & objectives

Emotion regulation is an integral component of multiple physical and psychological functions, and problems with emotion regulation are thought to be involved with the development of psychological disorders. Most laboratory research on emotion regulation has been limited to investigating short-term impact during a single session.

Design & methods

In the current study, we investigated the potential delayed consequences of the short-term use of two emotion regulation strategies: mindfulness and suppression. To do so, a two-session design was implemented, with 56 undergraduate participants viewing images under various regulation instructions at Time 1, returning one week later for a recognition memory test for these images at Time 2. Images were rated for valence and arousal at both time points.

Results

We hypothesized that images encoded mindfully would elicit lower levels of anxiety upon re-exposure, while suppression would increase levels of anxiety. Results did not support original hypotheses: although participants reported being calmer and happier at re-exposure, this effect did not vary by strategy. High-anxiety participants reported higher arousal levels regardless of Instruction condition or Time Point.

Conclusions

These findings suggest that short-term use of emotion regulation does not impact feelings of calmness long-term, when exposed to anxiety-provoking stimuli.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotion regulation
• mindfulness
• suppression
• anxiety
• memory

Data availability statement

Study data are openly available in The Open Science Foundation at https://osf.io/akwjn/.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 We note that restricting our analyses to just the women does not change the reported results. In addition, when we substituted “Sex” for “Trait Anxiety” in the analyses, Sex alone had no impact on any of the dependent variables. We had too few men in the low anxiety group to investigate any Sex x Trait Anxiety interactions.

2 We note that although negative images had higher hit rates than positive images, negative images also had higher levels of false alarms (that is, responding “old” to “new” photographs that had not been seen during encoding). This suggests that participants were using a more liberal response criteria for negative pictures.