Should we suppress or reappraise our stress?: the moderating role of reappraisal on cortisol reactivity and recovery in healthy adults

ABSTRACT

Background: People differ in their ability to regulate their physiological stress response. Individual differences in emotion regulation strategies such as suppression and reappraisal may explain this differential response to stress.

Objective: The aim of the current study was to assess whether daily use of suppression and reappraisal as well as their interaction predicted physiological stress reactivity and/or recovery, as assessed by variations in cortisol levels.

Method: Thirty-eight healthy young adults (13 men) completed the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire and were exposed to a psychosocial stressor, throughout which salivary cortisol was measured.

Results: Linear regressions showed main effects of reappraisal and suppression on cortisol reactivity and a main effect of suppression on cortisol recovery, where both strategies were positively associated with stress phases. Moreover, results showed a significant interaction of suppression by reappraisal in predicting both cortisol reactivity and recovery. Simple slope tests revealed that reappraisal moderated the association between suppression and both phases of cortisol responsivity.

Conclusion: Our results suggest that reappraisal represents a protective factor against the deleterious effects of suppression on stress responsivity. This study underlines the importance of investigating emotion regulation strategies as a means to understand individual differences in vulnerability to stress-related psychopathologies such as anxiety and depression.

KEYWORDS:

• Physiological stress
• emotion regulation
• cognition
• suppression
• reappraisal

Acknowledgments

We wish to express our gratitude to Charles-Édouard Giguère for his help with the statistical analyses and to Danie Majeur for revising the manuscript. We would also like to thank all of the participants for their participation in our study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This project was supported by a Foundation Grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) [grant number # 331786] to SJL and a Banting Doctoral Studentship from CIHR to CR. SJL holds the Canada’s Research Chair on Human Stress.