Emotions play a key role in most, if not all, people’s lives. There are numerous studies that show empirical evidence how emotions can either positively or negatively impact one’s daily performance at work, and even things such as personality and behavior . There are just a lot of things that can be dependent on emotions. The objective of this paper is to focus on the psychology of emotion, particularly the effects of emotion regulation on concurrent attention-related performance.
An individual’s attention can be perceived as one of the major determinants of performance . When it comes to the execution of a certain task, the general rule that suggests that the individual who can pay a higher level of attention on the execution of that particular task would most likely outperform other individuals who were not able to pay as high a level of attention the first individual we mentioned paid for doing the same thing. This is the reason why attention has been perceived as a type of mental resource and the process of effectively controlling and or managing one’s attention, especially when it comes to performing a certain task, a priced skill, in multiple academic studies.
One particular example of such study was that of Ortner, Zelazo, and Anderson (2013). In their study, which was published in the journal of Motivation and End Emotion, they investigated the effects of emotion regulation on current attention-related performance. They focused on two emotion regulation models namely the reappraisal and expression suppression model and their respective effects on emotional regulation. Basically, the authors’ narrative was written based on the immediate attention that any act or process that requires a certain level of cognitive function would require attention and in turn, any action or process aside from the main activity being performed that also requires attention can ultimately affect individual performance when performing that same task. What this means is that emotions, via either one of the two emotional regulation models we mentioned, can have a direct effect on one’s attention, which can in turn have a direct impact on an individual’s ability to focus and perform a certain task.
In order to fully understand what the researchers’ paper is all about, the readers have to understand the two emotional regulation models that they have focused on in their research first. Firstly, “reappraisal is a cognitive strategy that involves changing the evaluation of an emotion eliciting stimulus in order to diminish its impact, for example in order to reduce one’s anxiety, a job interview may be reappraised as an opportunity to assess whether or not one would enjoy working with a potential employer, rather than viewed as a test of one’s skills in answering the interviewer’s questions” .
Expression suppression, on the other hand, is another emotional regulation model wherein instead of reinterpreting an event or any emotional interaction with another person, the subject tries to suppress the emotion he is feeling or is about to feel in order to protect himself or other people. An example of this would be when two people gets interviewed for a job at the same time wherein the first one got good results while the other one did not. Naturally, the person who got good results in the interview would be happy while the one who got bad results would be sad. Now, in order to keep the person who got bad results in the interview from being too sad, the person who got good interview results would suppress his happiness. According to the authors of that paper, both of these emotion regulation strategies or models carry a certain degree of cognitive costs.
The question that should be asked then would be which among these two emotion regulation strategies carry the cognitive costs in terms of recurrent attention-related tasks. In that research, 32 undergraduate students from the University of Toronto were recruited as participants. Each participant was tested individually in sessions that lasted for approximately 45 minutes. They were all subjected to the two emotion regulation strategies (suppression and reappraisal). They were also subjected to one strategy wherein they were not required to carry or exhibit any form of emotion at all or the passive experimental control strategy. All of these were done by means of letting the participants view visual stimuli. For the first two emotional strategies, the subjects were asked to view some sad and disturbing pictures.
They were then asked to control their reactions. In the control setting, on the other hand, the subjects’ normal reactions when viewing a non-emotional related picture were observed. It is important to note that the outcome measure used by the authors to measure the extent of cognitive costs of each of the two emotional models was the subjects’ reaction time. The results of their controlled experiment suggested that both emotional regulation strategies and models led to increased reaction time on simple tasks which meant that they indeed affect an individual performance based on simple reaction time-based tasks such as viewing pictures in the case of the experiment .
The main difference between the two emotional regulation strategies, however, is that the reappraisal model has a lighter burden on the subject’s response time compared to the emotional suppression model. According to the authors, this may really be the case for most people because in the case of a person that suppresses his or her emotion, he or she has to do it constantly in order for that person not to get hurt. This means that every time the stimuli gets present, he or she has to expend the same amount of cognitive resources, in this case, attention time, to suppress that particular emotion.
In the case of a person that relies on emotional reappraisal, on the other hand, the person involved immediately reprograms his mind to have its own interpretation of a painful memory or an event right after it became present for the first time and so whenever any form of stimuli becomes present that makes him or her remember that event or memory, he or she would not have to spend the same amount of cognitive resources as compared to a person who keeps on suppressing his or her emotions. The authors compared the results of their study to that of an earlier published one by Richards and Gross (2000). According to the authors, in that earlier published study, the authors failed to instruct the participants to try to suppress any emotional feelings when viewing pictures. Nonetheless, their results support the results of that earlier-published journal by Richards and Gross.
References
Gross, J. (1998). Antecedent and response-focused emotion regulation: Divergent consequences for experience, expression, and physiology. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 224-237.
Ortner, C., Zelazo, P., & Anderson, A. (2013). Effects of Emotion Regulation on Concurrent Attentional Performance. Motivation and Emotion, 346-354.
Richards, J., & Gross, J. (2000). Emotion Regulation and Memory: The Cognitive Costs of Keeping one's cool abstract. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 410-424.
Szasz, P., Szentagotai, A., & Hofmann, S. (2011). The effect of emotion regulation strategies on anger Abstract. Behavioral Research and Therapy, 114-119.
