Catching the audience in a job interview: Effects of emotion regulation strategies on subjective, physiological, and behavioural responses

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsycho.2021.108089Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Combined Cognitive Reappraisal strategies increase heart rate variability.

  • Suppression increased physiological stress levels during and after acute stress.

  • Combined Cognitive Reappraisal group expressed higher regulation process satisfaction.

  • Suppression group were perceived as performing worse in the speech task.

  • Combined Cognitive Reappraisal group displayed more social approach behaviours.

Abstract

In the emotion regulation process more than one strategy is often used, though studies continue to rely on the manipulation of one strategy alone. This study compares the effects of Combined Cognitive Reappraisal (CCR: acceptance and reappraise via perspective-taking) and suppression using the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST). One hundred participants were randomly assigned to one of the two groups and subjective, physiological, and behavioural data were recorded. Continuous electrocardiography was recorded to measure heart rate variability (HRV) and stress levels. Affective ratings were provided before and after the TSST. Behavioural expressions were videotaped and analysed independently. Trait social anxiety/fear, age and gender entered as covariates. Although no group differences were found on affective ratings, the CCR group presented less physiological stress, higher HRV, their speech was better perceived, displayed more affiliative smile and hand gestures. Results suggested that CCR is more appropriate than suppression for managing social stress situations.

Introduction

Acute social stress is an almost universal experience. Being intrinsically emotional, social stress requires using emotion regulation (ER) strategies (Gross, 2015). Difficulties in deploying such strategies may predict several negative outcomes; and in the long-term may contribute to the development of clinical symptoms (Sheppes, Suri, & Gross, 2015). ER is a dynamic and multifaceted regulatory process through which one tries to manage one’s emotions, their intensity, and the way the emotions are experienced or expressed (Gross, 2015). In everyday life, ER strategies are deployed spontaneously and in combination (Aldao & Nolen-Hoeksema, 2013; Ford, Gross, & Gruber, 2019). In contrast, research has mainly focused on using one strategy compared to another (Gross, 2015).

The Extended Process Model of ER by Gross (2015) outlines three primary stages: the need to regulate a certain emotion, strategy selection, and implementation. The author underlines the continuous and dynamic valuation process over time while considering the role of individual differences and the context, defending the use of more than one strategy during an ER process over time as an adjustment response. Ford et al. (2019) defined polyregulation as the concurrent or sequential use of multiple strategies to regulate emotions in a single emotional episode. The authors also postulate that evidence is lacking in regard to the impact of polyregulation.

Several ER strategies have been studied, with research indicating that cognitive change strategies (e.g. cognitive reappraise via perspective-taking) tend to be the more effective compared to strategies of attentional deployment (e.g. distraction, concentration) and response modulation (e.g. suppression) (see Webb, Miles, & Sheeran, 2012). In addition, the timing effect hypothesis proposes that ER is more effective when emotion is still at a low-intensity level than at a high level (Sheppes & Gross, 2011). According to the Model Process of ER (Gross, 1998), timing is essential for suppression because it operates at a later stage in the ER process. Thus, it requires more effort to modify existing and new emotional information (Sheppes & Gross, 2011). Research in negative contexts also suggests that acceptance and cognitive reappraise via perspective-taking are the most used, whereas suppression tend to be the least reported (Szasz, Coman, Curtiss, Carpenter, & Hofmann, 2018).

Considering the literature on ER strategies characteristics and related outcomes during negative, anxiety-inducing contexts The present research analysed the responses to a social stress situation using a combination of two cognitive reappraisal strategies (CCR: acceptance/reappraisal of the emotional response and cognitive reappraise via perspective-taking) compared to the suppression of emotional expression (SEE).

Section snippets

Emotion regulation strategies and outcomes

Cognitive reappraise of the stimulus via perspective-taking involves rethinking a stimulus to change its emotional meaning and impact (Webb et al., 2012) by targeting either the meaning or the self-relevance of a potentially emotion-eliciting situation (Gross, 2015). It has shown to be the most effective strategy in stressful situations in decreasing negative affect and increasing positive affect (Jentsch & Wolf, 2020; Quinones, Rodríguez-Carvajal, & Griffiths, 2017), decreasing behavioural

Present study

Our study expands previous research in two ways: first, the usage of the CCR strategies in a social evaluative situation; second, the analysis of the three-systems of emotion by measuring subjective, physiological (cardiovascular measures) and behavioural responses.

Few studies have addressed the ER responses across the three-systems of emotions and the associations between the systems. Therefore, the correspondence between the three-systems remains unclear, though some authors highlight the

Participants

We used GPower 3.1 to estimate the sample size. Based on prior effect size on reappraisal data from physiological (autonomic) and performance outcomes (d = 0.76, f = 0.38, Beltzer et al., 2014), two independent groups, power = .90, p <  .05, and three covariates, we would require 65 participants for conducting Multivariate Analyses of Covariance. Nevertheless, we recruited a larger sample because we collected different outcomes.

We recruited participants via snowball sampling. As recommended (

Results

As shown in Table 1, groups did not differ on most sociodemographic variables, apart from marital status. No participant reported having a mental disorder, and both groups had similarly low levels of trait social anxiety/fear (M = 27.03, SD = 11.20). At baseline, both groups reported mild states of anxiety (M = 2.40, SD = 0.48), and showed normative physiological HRV index (RMSSD: M = 39.21, SD = 22.73) and stress indexes (M = 11.03, SD = 3.56). Correlations between physiological measures and

Discussion

This study investigated the impact of the combination of two cognitive reappraisal strategies on self-report, physiological, and behavioural responses in a socially stressful context. To the best of our knowledge, our study is the first proposal for combining these two strategies. We investigated whether the use of CCR would be more appropriate than SEE for each of the outcomes.

Contrary to our expectations, results on subjective self-report measures have not confirmed our initial hypothesis

Funding

The Portuguese National Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) supported this work [grant numbers SFRH/BD/126304/2016, UID/PSI/03125/2020].

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Anabela Caetano Santos: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Visualization, Writing - original draft. Patrícia Arriaga: Conceptualization, Data curation, Methodology, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Resources, Software, Supervision, Writing - review & editing. Celeste Simões: Writing - review & editing.

Declaration of Competing Interest

None

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge Adriano Mendes, Antonino Chorinca, Joana Alegrete, Sofia Sequeira and Virginia Pedro for their collaboration as judges in the TSST task, Rob Richards for his great support in proofreading the manuscript, and João Daniel with the FDR analysis consulting.

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