Inhibited The Expression Of Alternative Impact Study On The Physiological, Subjective Experience And Memory. Expression

In the last 40 years, especially last 10 years, researchers have been focusing on experiential, physiological and cognitional aspects influenced by different kinds of emotion regulation strategies. In 1998, James Gross put forward response-focused emotion regulation strategies, which means after emotion response happened, changing physiological, experiential, or behavioral elements. Many emotion theorists consider that facial impression is one of the most important elements in emotion responses (Darwin,1872,1965; Ekman,1993; Izard,1971; Tomkins, 1962,1963) . Therefore, in researches of response-focused emotion regulation strategies, facial expression regulation is studied very frequently. Researchers pay high attention to expressive suppression and expressive dissonance in all expression regulation strategies. Expressive suppression is a form of response modulation that involves inhibiting ongoing emotion-expressive behavior (Gross, 1998), Expressive dissonance refers to the incongruence between an emotional state (e.g., sadness) and a behavioral expression (e.g., a smile) (Robinson&Demaree, 2006).This research studied how expressive suppression and expressive dissonance influence physiological, experiential and cognitional elements on both positive and negative emotion statuses. There main subjects are whether expressive suppression and expressive dissonance will result in greater sympathetic arousal; whether will influence positive and negative experiences; whether will impair memory and impair what kind of information to memory.This experiment research has 72 college students participants whose emotion elicited by sad and happy films and using 3 (natural watching condition, expressive suppression, expressive dissonance)×2 (positive emotion, negative emotion) between-subjects design. Physical Polygraphic Recording is used to record physiological data; subjective report questionnaire is used to measure emotion experience; memory items are presented by presentation software.The solutions of there main questions are following:Firstly, when watching sad and happy film, persons using the expressive suppression and expressive dissonant strategies were evidenced greater sympathetic arousal (greater skin conduction reaction change, R-R interval shortened more greatly, PPG increased more greatly).Secondly, when watching sad film, there was no difference on sad emotion between persons using the expressive suppression and expressive dissonant strategies and natural watching persons. In other words, expressive regulation didn't result in decreasing of sad emotion. When watching happy film, persons using the expressive suppression and expressive dissonant strategies experienced less happy and love emotion than natural watching persons. In other words, expressive regulation resulted in decreasing of positive emotion.Thirdly, when watching sad and happy film, persons using the expressive suppression and expressive dissonant strategies performed worse on subsequent memory tasks than persons in the natural-watch conditions. In other words, expressive regulation can impair memory on environment information, while can not impair memory on dialogue and emotion information.