Many Western societies favor emotion regulation in social interactions. We’re taught to tough it out, not let them see us cry, and keep a poker face in place. But is there a cost to maintain a stiff upper lip?

According to this study, there can be a cognitive cost that impacts your memory depending on how you regulate your emotions.

Emotion Regulation

When approaching a situation, there are two ways to apply emotion regulation. You can either prepare yourself beforehand, or you can actively monitor yourself after your emotions have been triggered. These two approaches are called reappraisal and emotion suppression.

Reappraisal is an antecedent-focused regulation, meaning that you make changes before any emotional stimulus occurs. This type of emotion management redefines your perspective on a situation. Choosing to view an upcoming obstacle as a challenge or to see a punishment as a lesson are examples of reappraisal.

Emotion suppression, on the other hand, is a response-focused regulation. This is the process of monitoring and adjusting your reaction after your emotional response has been triggered. Examples of this include biting your lip to keep from crying or maintaining a blank face during a conversation to not give away what you’re feeling.

As best stated in the study, emotion suppression “mops up one’s emotions;” reappraisal “keeps them from spilling in the first place.”

Cost of Concealment

Even though reappraisal and emotion suppression are both forms of managing your emotions, they carry different cognitive consequences.

Those who suppressed their emotions throughout the experiment were less likely to remember conversations and other verbal aspects of their memory. The study suggests that this is because self-language is used to monitor and keep your emotions in check. When this happens it also diminishes your ability to track incoming verbal cues.

The more you preoccupy your mind with trying to suppress emotions, the worse your memory will be. Since we employ emotion regulation in social interactions, suppressing emotions can have additional negative effects in the relationships you hold both personally and professionally.

So what about reappraisal, were consequences found there? The study did find that reappraisal affected memory, however it was not the same as emotion suppression.

Changing Emotional Reality

Where emotion suppression affected memory stored verbally, reappraisal did not show any loss to verbal memory. In fact, it showed higher nonverbal retention in memory.

The study did not have an exact reasoning for this, but they believe it could be because reappraisal provided a “script” for how the experiment would play out. This priming could be what allowed their attention to be placed elsewhere, allowing them to remember more of the experiment at large.

When applied in real life, reappraisal could offer the same benefits. Reappraisal can help you change your mindset for an upcoming situation or event. This framework can also help you to accept a new emotional reality. In doing so, it can free up your cognitive processes to remember more from whatever situation or event you participate in.

In the end, depending on how you regulate your emotions can come at a cost. Don’t just fly blind and trying to contain your emotional response in a situation. Work to build a healthy perspective on the front end to help yield better memory retention.

As seen in the study, when faced with an obstacle of some sort, it is better to adjust your mindset before proceeding. Setting up your mindset at the beginning can save energy on your part while going through the experience.

You can’t control every situation you find yourself in, but by mentally preparing yourself in advance you can control the impact it has on your emotional state and memory.

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