Expressive suppression
Also known as: Emotional suppression
Hiding the outward signs of an emotion while still feeling it inside.
What it means
Expressive suppression is a response-focused emotion-regulation strategy that inhibits the outward behavioral display of an emotion after it has already arisen, such as keeping a straight face while upset. Because it acts late, it dampens visible expression but typically fails to reduce, and may even increase, the underlying physiological arousal and negative experience. Suppression also carries cognitive and social costs: it impairs memory for the suppressed event and tends to make interaction partners uncomfortable and less connected. In Gross's process model it is the standard contrast to reappraisal, illustrating that when in the regulation sequence one intervenes matters as much as whether one regulates. Chronic reliance on it is linked to poorer well-being.
Why the timing matters
Suppression is a response-focused move: it enters the emotion-generative sequence at the very end, after the appraisals have run and the physiological and experiential response is already underway. It therefore edits the visible output without touching the appraisals that produced the feeling. Holding an expression flat is not passive work. It demands continuous self-monitoring, watching your own face, voice and posture and correcting them in real time. That monitoring competes for the same limited working-memory resources you would otherwise spend attending to the situation and the person in front of you. This is why suppression reliably drains cognitive capacity while leaving the emotion's engine running, and why, unlike a reappraisal that reframes the situation earlier, it tends to raise rather than lower sympathetic arousal.
What the experiments found
In Gross's original film studies, people told to conceal their reactions to a disgusting clip looked calmer but reported no less disgust, and showed heightened cardiovascular activation relative to those who simply watched; reappraisers, by contrast, felt less disgust with no such physiological penalty. Richards and Gross then showed across several experiments that suppressing expression during an emotional event left people with measurably poorer memory for what had happened, consistent with the working-memory account. In large questionnaire samples using the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire, people who habitually suppress report less positive emotion, more negative emotion, and lower life satisfaction than habitual reappraisers. These are correlational patterns of modest size drawn mostly from Western samples, not deterministic effects, and they describe tendencies rather than fixed outcomes.
The interpersonal cost
Suppression is visible to others even when the emotion is not. In laboratory conversations, partners of instructed suppressors formed less rapport and reported liking them less, and, strikingly, showed elevated blood pressure themselves, as though the effort to stay unreadable transmitted stress across the interaction. Prospectively, Srivastava and colleagues followed students through their first months of college and found that those who suppressed more formed fewer close relationships and felt less socially supported, even after accounting for extraversion and depressive symptoms. The mechanism is affiliative rather than moral: expression is how people signal availability and coordinate closeness, so a deliberately flat exterior withholds the very cues that let others read you and draw near.
Culture changes the calculus
Most of these costs were documented in Western, individualist settings where open expression is expected and a blank face reads as withdrawal or concealment. When Butler, Lee and Gross compared people holding European-American values with those holding more Asian values, the social penalties of suppression shrank or disappeared for the latter group; their suppression was less tied to negative emotion and hostile behavior. In cultural contexts that prize interpersonal harmony and restraint, damping one's display can signal consideration rather than distance. The practical lesson is that suppression is not intrinsically harmful. Its cost depends heavily on whether the surrounding norms treat visible emotion as information others are entitled to, and on how large the gap is between what is felt and what is shown.
Examples
Maintaining a neutral expression through a colleague's hurtful comment leaves you just as upset, less able to recall the conversation, and harder for others to read.
A father keeps his face blank through a frightening film so his daughter isn't scared. His heart still races, he recalls little of the plot, and she finds him oddly distant.
On a first date, someone hides their nerves behind a flat smile. The nerves don't subside, and the other person leaves feeling they never quite got through.
A nurse keeps her face composed while telling a family their treatment options have run out. Holding the mask in place takes constant effort, and the family senses a flatness they cannot name and warm to her less because of it.
A poker player masks every reaction to keep opponents guessing. The constant effort to stay stone-faced eats the attention he needs to track the betting, and the tension leaves his body wound tight.
First described in James Gross (1998).
Key references
- Srivastava, S., Tamir, M., McGonigal, K. M., John, O. P., & Gross, J. J. (2009). The social costs of emotional suppression: A prospective study of the transition to college. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96(4), 883-897. doi.org/10.1037/a0014755
- Butler, E. A., Lee, T. L., & Gross, J. J. (2007). Emotion regulation and culture: Are the social consequences of emotion suppression culture-specific? Emotion, 7(1), 30-48. doi.org/10.1037/1528-3542.7.1.30
- Gross, J. J., & John, O. P. (2003). Individual differences in two emotion regulation processes: Implications for affect, relationships, and well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(2), 348-362. doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.85.2.348
- Butler, E. A., Egloff, B., Wilhelm, F. H., Smith, N. C., Erickson, E. A., & Gross, J. J. (2003). The social consequences of expressive suppression. Emotion, 3(1), 48-67. doi.org/10.1037/1528-3542.3.1.48
- Richards, J. M., & Gross, J. J. (2000). Emotion regulation and memory: The cognitive costs of keeping one's cool. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79(3), 410-424. doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.79.3.410
- Gross, J. J. (1998). Antecedent- and response-focused emotion regulation: Divergent consequences for experience, expression, and physiology. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(1), 224-237. doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.74.1.224