Biological psychology
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Biological psychology · Apr 2014
Testing the effects of suppression and reappraisal on emotional concordance using a multivariate multilevel model.
In theory, the essence of emotion is coordination across experiential, behavioral, and physiological systems in the service of functional responding to environmental demands. However, people often regulate emotions, which could either reduce or enhance cross-system concordance. The present study tested the effects of two forms of emotion regulation (expressive suppression, positive reappraisal) on concordance of subjective experience (positive-negative valence), expressive behavior (positive and negative), and physiology (inter-beat interval, skin conductance, blood pressure) during conversations between unacquainted young women. ⋯ Suppression reduced overall expression for both regulating and uninstructed partners, while reappraisal reduced negative experience. Neither strategy influenced the uninstructed partners' concordance. These results suggest that emotion regulation impacts concordance by altering the temporal coupling of phasic subsystem responses, rather than by having divergent effects on subsystem tonic levels.
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Theories of emotion generally posit the synchronized, coordinated, and/or emergent combination of psychophysiological, cognitive, and behavioral components of the emotion system--emotional concordance--as a functional definition of emotion. However, the empirical support for this claim has been weak or inconsistent. As an introduction to this special issue on emotional concordance, we consider three domains of explanations as to why this theory-data gap might exist. ⋯ Second, there may be moderating factors such as emotion regulation, context, or individual differences that have obscured concordance. Finally, the methods typically used to test theory may be inadequate. In particular, we review a variety of potential issues: intensity of emotions elicited in the laboratory, nonlinearity, between- versus within-subject associations, the relative timing of components, bivariate versus multivariate approaches, and diversity of physiological processes.