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Managing Your Emotions After They Occur

One strategy for managing emotions is to try to modify or control them after we become aware of them (Gross et al., 2006). An event triggers arousal, interpretation, and awareness of an emotion. We then consciously try to modify our internal experience and outward communication of that emotion.

The two most common ways people manage emotions after they have been triggered are suppression and venting. Suppression involves inhibiting thoughts, arousal, and outward behavioral displays of emotion (Richards, Butler, & Gross, 2003). For example, one participant in an emotion management study describes suppressing his communication of happiness and surprise after scoring well on a college paper in which he had invested little effort (Gross et al., 2006):

I didn’t work very hard on this paper so I was surprised. My roommate actually did some work and didn’t get a good grade, so he was very down about it. I was very happy inside, but at the same time, I didn’t want to show up my roommate because he’s my friend. Instead of acting happy and surprised, I kind of put on my academic sad face and said, “Oh, I didn’t do well either.” (p. 11)

The desire to suppress stems from the recognition that feeling, thinking, and openly communicating certain emotions would be relationally, socially, or culturally inappropriate. Although people sometimes suppress positive emotion, suppression occurs most commonly with negative emotions, especially anger and sadness (Gross et al., 2006). This is because displays of pleasant emotions elicit favorable responses from others, whereas the expression of negative emotions often drives other people away (Argyle & Lu, 1990; Furr & Funder, 1998).

Suppression is the most widely practiced strategy for managing unavoidable and unwanted emotions. But its effectiveness is marginal, because you are trying to modify intense arousal you are already experiencing, the thoughts you are already thinking, and the body’s natural inclination to display this arousal and these thoughts in the form of expressions (Lopes et al., 2005).

The inverse of suppression is venting: allowing emotions to dominate our thoughts and explosively expressing them (Fuendeling, 1998; Kostiuk & Fouts, 2002). Venting may be positive, such as when we jump up and shout for joy after learning we got the job we wanted. At other times, we vent negative emotions, such as when we “blow up” at a spouse or other family member who has been pestering us repeatedly.