Suppress for success? Exploring the contexts in which expressing positive emotion can have social costs

ABSTRACT

Researchers and lay people alike have tended to focus on social benefits of expressing positive emotion and, as a result, tend to overlook potential social costs. In this paper, we consider limits to the idea that expressing positive emotion is universally beneficial and review literature demonstrating that, in some contexts, expressing positive emotion can have social costs. Building on our own and others’ work in this space, we outline three sociocontextual factors that influence the social success of positive emotion expression: To avoid potential costs, we suggest that positive emotion should generally be expressed in the right situation, by (and to) the right person, and in the right way. Where positive emotion expression may incur social costs, we propose people can effectively down-regulate positive emotion through use of expressive suppression, and review literature demonstrating that there can be social benefits to down-regulating positive emotion. This review advances theorising on the importance of considering context when seeking to understand socially successful emotion expression and regulation.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotion expression
• emotion regulation
• positive emotion
• expressive suppression
• social relations

Acknowledgements

We thank Bill von Hippel, Peter Kuppens, Matthew Hornsey, and Eleanor Miles for comments on a draft of this paper and Alexandra Hall and Sienna Hinton-Pryde for assistance with manuscript preparation.

Notes

¹ We note that the emotion mismatch principle is not necessarily unique to positive emotion and could be employed to understand negative emotion, although that is not our current theoretical focus. We return to this issue later in the manuscript.

Additional information

Funding

Katharine Greenaway is supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DE160100761). Elise Kalokerinos is supported by a Marie Sklodowska-Curie individual fellowship (704298) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.