Chronic versus recent expressive suppression burdens are differentially associated with cognitive performance among older adults

ABSTRACT

Introduction: Expressive suppression (ES; suppression of affective behavior) has been shown to have a deleterious impact on subsequently administered tests of executive functions (EF), threatening validity, and reliability of EF assessment. Past research has shown that recent ES (i.e., across 24 hours prior to testing) and chronic ES (i.e., across 2 weeks prior to testing) have differential impact on test performance. The present study compared the association of chronic vs. recent ES with speed vs. accuracy of performance on tests of EF and tests of lower-order processes.

Method

Participants were 255 community-dwelling older adults aged 60 and older. Participants completed timed subtests of the Delis–Kaplan Executive Function System and the Burden of State Emotion Regulation Questionnaire.

Results

Hierarchical linear regressions examined the contributions of chronic vs. recent ES to test performance. Recent ES was related to scores of both speed and accuracy on EF tests. The association between recent ES and EF errors held beyond covariates (i.e., chronic ES, demographics, depression, and general cognitive status). In contrast, the association between recent ES and EF speed was fully explained by EF error scores. Chronic ES was associated only with speed of performance and only on lower-order tasks, but this relationship did not survive correction for cognitive, psychiatric, and demographic factors.

Conclusions

Recent ES appears to be a risk factor for EF lapses. Chronic ES, while related to performance speed, seems to also relate to several other cognitive, psychiatric, and demographic factors, which themselves explain slower information processing.

KEYWORDS:

• Executive functioning
• expressive suppression
• errors
• speed
• aging
• emotion regulation
• Delis–Kaplan Executive Function System
• assessment

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. Though for young adults this was true only for individuals whose chronic ES was average or below average; in other words, for those with high chronic ES, high recent ES had no unique impact beyond the chronic burden (Franchow & Suchy, 2015).

2. Scaled Scores are a type of a standard metric routinely employed by clinical measures of cognition. Raw scores are converted to Scaled Scores using normative tables provided in test manuals. The mean Scaled Score of the normative reference group is always 10 and standard deviation is always 3. The D-KEFS Scaled Scores are age-corrected, such that, for example, a participant who is 73 years old can be compared to a normative reference group of people who are also in their seventies. Because Scaled Scores range from 1 to 19, they also automatically correct for extreme outliers (i.e., no scores are more than 3 SDs away from the mean), thereby facilitating normal distribution of scores.

3. Motor Speed Condition was not included since this condition does not have an error score.

4. This conversion affected less than 1% of the error data points.