Expressive Suppression

Expressive suppression is an emotion regulation strategy in which a person deliberately inhibits or masks the outward, visible behavioral expression of an emotion they are currently experiencing internally, such as maintaining a calm, neutral facial expression while actually feeling angry, anxious, or upset, without this effort necessarily changing the underlying felt emotion itself. The psychologist James Gross and his research collaborators studied expressive suppression alongside cognitive reappraisal, documented separately in this section, as one of the two most extensively examined strategies within his influential process model of emotion regulation, a framework distinguishing strategies according to how early or late they intervene in the unfolding emotional response. Research conducted within this framework has generally found that habitual reliance on expressive suppression is associated with a range of less favorable outcomes compared with reappraisal, including continued or even heightened internal physiological arousal despite the outwardly suppressed expression, poorer memory for the specific details of the emotional situation itself, and negative effects on the quality of social interactions, since a conversation partner interacting with someone actively suppressing their expressed emotion often experiences the exchange as less genuine, less engaged, or more effortful than an ordinary emotionally expressive interaction. Despite these documented costs, expressive suppression remains an extremely common everyday regulation strategy, particularly in social and professional contexts where openly displaying certain emotions is discouraged.