The effect of emotion regulation strategies on anger

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Abstract

This study examined the effects of different emotion regulation strategies on the experience and expression of anger. Participants consisted of undergraduate students who endorsed at least a moderate level of state anger. As part of a laboratory experiment, they were instructed to reappraise (n = 24), suppress (n = 24), or accept (n = 25) their anger during a frustrating task. Reappraisal was more effective at reducing anger than attempts to suppress or accept it. Furthermore, participants in the reappraisal condition persisted significantly longer with the frustrating task than those who were instructed to suppress or accept their negative feelings. These findings suggest that reappraisal techniques are more effective than acceptance and suppression techniques for modulating the experience and expression of anger.

Section snippets

The effects of emotion regulation strategies on anger

Being able to regulate one’s emotions is adaptive and promotes psychological well-being, especially when dealing with anger and distress (Mauss, Cook, Cheng, & Gross, 2007). Emotion regulation consists of processes through which individuals modulate their emotions in an automatic and effortless and/or conscious and effortful manner (Bargh & Williams, 2007, Campbell-Sills and Barlow, 2007), and try to influence the occurrence, intensity, duration, and expression of those emotions to

Participants

Participants included 97 undergraduate students (61.9% female) from computer science, mathematics, sociology, and psychology classes at Babes-Bolyai University. They received course credit for participating in this study. All participants completed the anger induction procedure. In order to be able to study the effects of the instruction manipulation on anger, only those participants were included in the final analysis if they endorsed at least a moderate level of state anger based on their

Manipulation checks

The ASQ subscales and ABS-II sub-set items scores confirmed that the participants successfully used the strategy that they were instructed to use (Table 1).

Randomization

Participants were randomly assigned to one of the three experimental groups (Reappraisal, Acceptance, and Suppression). The three groups were comparable in their level of positive affect, F (2, 70) = 0.19, p > .82, and negative affect, F (2.70) = 1.34, p > .26, on the Profile of Affective Distress for baseline measure (Table 2). Furthermore,

Discussion

The present study investigated the effects of different emotion regulation strategies (reappraisal, acceptance, and suppression) on experimentally-induced anger at the subjective and behavioral level, as measured by anger and task persistence. Previous studies have consistently indicated that suppression is the least effective emotion regulation strategy because it leads to elevated levels of physiological arousal and psychological distress (Campbell-Sills and Barlow, 2007, Gross, 1998).

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    Dr. Hofmann is a paid consultant by Schering-Plough and supported by NIMH grant 1R01MH078308.

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