My mother once told me that she is a passive-aggressive type of person, explaining that she seems to bottle everything up inside until those emotions burst from inside, usually at the person causing the distress. My father seems to be the same way, wearing a smile on his face as issues become more frequent and complex until the only response left is a frown. My brother, I think, tries to keep his negativity in check around his friends until he can find someone to vent his frustrations to. Even I seem to have inherited the same habit, where I worry about school, work, home, family, the present, the future, and everything in between. Plans unravel, situations become more dire, and all one can do is smile and press on as things grow more out of control. When searching for inspiration for this blog post, though, I started to realize that maybe, similar to learning more about pessimism, this form of coping with negativity might not be the healthiest to enact.
Though I couldn’t find information related to it in the book or modules for this course, an article by Ana Masedo and M. Rosa Esteve a concept called “Wegner’s Theory of Ironic Processes”, and how theory has been used to study pain tolerance. Masedo and Esteve mention how “Research suggests that suppression contributes to a more distressing pain experience”, and their experiment seemed to involve putting groups representing the variables of repression, acceptance, and spontaneous coping, and exposing them to “a cold presser procedure.” The results of Masedo and Esteve’s experiment, then, indicate that “The acceptance group showed pain and distress immersion ratings that were significantly lower than in the other two groups”.
Another study focused on suppression and acceptance was conducted by Laura Campbell-Sills, David Barlow, Timothy Brown, and Stefan Hofmann. In their study, participants with anxiety and mood disorders were assigned to two groups where they seemed to learn either emotion suppression or emotion acceptance before proceeding to watch an emotional movie. From this study and their measurements, Campbell-Sills et al. found that “Although both groups reported similar levels of subjective distress during the film, the acceptance group displayed less negative affect during the post-film recovery period. Furthermore, the suppression group showed increased heart rate, and the acceptance group decreased heart rate in response to the film.” While Masedo and Esteve showed how acceptance can affect ones reaction to physical pain, Campbell-Sills et al. seem to demonstrate how it can also have an effect on emotional distress, as well.
Though these articles’ abstracts don’t really provide much explanation about acceptance and suppression and how these concepts could relate to pain, their results make me wonder how that data can relate to the way my family seems to handle stress. If repression of our negative emotions isn’t effective in eliminating physical and emotional pain experienced momentarily in an experiment, then how effective is it to really cope like this in a more realistic environment? How many people engage in repression, possibly without even realizing it, when there could be other ways to handle whatever pain they feel?
References:
Campbell-Sills, L., Barlow, D. H., Brown, T. A., & Hofmann, S. G. (2005, November 21). Effects of suppression and acceptance on emotional responses of individuals with anxiety and mood disorders. Retrieved April 19, 2020, from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0005796705002068
Masedo, A. I., & Esteve, M. R. (2006, March 29). Effects of suppression, acceptance and spontaneous coping on pain tolerance, pain intensity and distress. Retrieved April 19, 2020, from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0005796706000489