Expressive Regulation 1 Running Head: COGNITIVE CONSEQUENCES OF EXPRESSIVE REGULATION Cognitive Consequences of Expressive Regulation in Older Adults

Previous research has suggested that older and younger adults are equally able to regulate their outward expressions of emotion, and that the regulation of emotional expression in younger adults results in decreased memory for the emotional stimulus. The current study examines whether older adults show this same memory effect. Older and younger adults viewed positive and negative emotional pictures under instructions to view the pictures naturally, enhance their facial expressions, or suppress their facial expressions. Older and younger adults showed equivalent outward regulation of expression, but suppressing their emotional expressions led to reduced memory for emotional stimuli only in the young adults. The results suggest that older and younger adults are achieving control of their expressions through different mechanisms or strategies. Expressive Regulation 3 Cognitive Consequences of Expressive Regulation in Older Adults The ability to control one’s outward expressions of emotion has been a topic of interest across both the general psychological literature and among those studying developmental processes in adulthood. Being able to flexibly enhance and suppress one’s expressions as warranted by the situation has been linked to better social adjustment (Bonanno, Papa, Lalande, Westphal, & Coifman, 2004). Studies suggest that when younger adults effectively regulate their outward emotional expressions they show minimal changes in actual emotional feelings, but show increased physiological arousal and cognitive costs in the form of decreased memory for the arousing stimuli (Richards, 2004). In the aging literature, research to date has shown that older and younger adults show similar emotional and physiological responses to expressive regulation (Kunzmann, Kupperbusch, & Levenson, 2005). No study, however, has examined the cognitive consequences of expression regulation in older adults. Current research on the broader construct of emotion regulation suggests that older adults may approach emotional situations differently than young adults, and may find other types of emotion regulation less cognitively costly (Scheibe & Blanchard-Fields, 2009). The current study therefore examines potential age differences in the impact of expression control on memory for emotional material. Expressive Regulation and its Cognitive Consequences The majority of research on the consequences of expression regulation has focused on the strategy of Expressive Suppression, or preventing an outwardly visible reaction in response to an emotional event or stimulus. A smaller body of work has examined Expressive Enhancement, or exaggerating a naturally occurring emotional expression. Both expressive suppression and enhancement have been described as “response-focused” strategies of emotion regulation (Demaree, Robinson, Pu, & Allen, 2006; Gross & Thompson, 2007), in which the attempt to Expressive Regulation 4 control the expression is through direct control of the facial muscles. These expressive regulation strategies may be contrasted with “antecedent-focused” emotion regulation strategies such as situation selection (e.g., choosing to avoid a potentially unpleasant situation in the first place) or cognitive “reappraisal” of a situation (e.g., deciding that you will think about the unpleasant situation in a way that is not upsetting), which are directed at controlling the initiation or appraisal of an emotional response (Gross & Thompson, 2007). Although antecedent regulation strategies such as reappraisal may also reduce the expression of emotion (e.g., Phillips, Henry, Hosie, & Milne, 2008; Richards & Gross, 2000), they influence the facial expression indirectly, through control of thoughts, rather than directly, through the control of muscles. In research using college students, both expressive suppression and expressive enhancement have been found to have minimal to negative consequences for affective feelings. Suppression and exaggeration of expression in response to negative stimuli generally do not change subjective reports of affect (e.g., Bonanno, Papa, Lalande, Westphal, & Coifman, 2004; Demaree et al., 2004; Gross & Levenson, 1993; Richards & Gross, 1999). In contrast, the suppression of response to positive stimuli results in reports of decreased positive affect (Gross & Levenson, 1997), although exaggeration in response to positive stimuli does not appear to impact affect (Demaree et al., 2004). The ineffectiveness of expressive regulation on changing internal feelings suggests that this type of regulation is not aimed at reducing feelings, but at either hiding or communicating the emotional response from/to others. In contrast to reported feelings, both expressive suppression and enhancement have been found to increase physiological arousal. Laboratory participants who are instructed to suppress or exaggerate their facial expressions in response to positive or negative stimuli tend to show Expressive Regulation 5 increases in measures of sympathetic nervous system activation compared to participants in unregulated control conditions (Demaree, Schmeichel, Robinson, & Everhart, 2004; Gross & Levenson, 1997). The cognitive consequences of expressive regulation have been studied primarily using subsequent memory for the emotional material. In college students, the act of controlling one’s facial expressions has been shown to lead to reduced memory for the emotional event. Several experimental studies have shown that when participants are instructed to suppress their expressions in response to either positive or negative stimuli, they later show impaired memory for those stimuli (Bonanno et al., 2004; Dillon, Ritchey, Johnson, & LaBar, 2007; Richards & Gross, 2000). Similarly, although there is less research on the impact of enhancement on memory, at least one study has shown that enhancement of facial expressions also results in reduced memory performance (Bonanno et al., 2004). This reduced memory in response to the control of facial expressions has generally been regarded as an indication of attention to the emotional stimulus. That is, it is assumed that the goal of regulating facial expression causes a diversion of attention from the processing of the stimuli to the control of behavior (Richards, 2004), and this reduction in stimulus processing thus reduces memory for the stimuli (Dillon, et al., 2007). This effect of expressive regulation on memory can be contrasted with the effect of other strategies aimed at regulation of emotion. For example, thinking about the stimulus in a way that either increases or decreases emotional feelings has been shown to increase memory for the stimulus (Dillon et al., 2007). Thus, both types of regulation have a different impact on memory through the same mechanism: either attention is drawn away from the stimulus (e.g., expressive suppression) or towards the stimulus (e.g., cognitive reappraisal). This effect of attention is thought to be overlaid on the general and Expressive Regulation 6 automatic effect of arousal on memory (Dillon et al., 2007). That is, emotional (arousing) stimuli are better-remembered than non-arousing stimuli (e.g., Phelps, 2006), regardless of whether or which regulation strategy is employed. Regulation will instead determine how much better the arousing stimuli are remembered. Cognitive reappraisal, which encourages elaborative processing, results in greater recall of emotional material than no regulation, but Expressive Regulation, which diverts attention from the stimulus, results in worse recall than no regulation. Aging and Expressive Regulation To our knowledge, three published studies have examined age differences in the ability to suppress and enhance facial expressions of emotion (Kunzmann, Kupperbusch, & Levenson, 2005; Phillips, Henry, Hosie, & Milne, 2008; Magai, Consedine, Krivoshekova, KudadjieGyamfi, & McPherson, 2006), though as in the young adult literature most of the emphasis has been on suppression rather than exaggeration, and on between-subjects rather than withinsubjects experiments. These studies find that older and younger adults are equally able to suppress and enhance their facial expressions when asked to do so. Age equivalencies in the regulation of emotional expression can be contrasted with age differences in emotion regulation strategies that are focused on avoiding the initiation of emotion itself or changing the appraisal of an emotional situation. For example, older adults are more likely to report that they avoid emotionally charged confrontations when such confrontations may be destructive (e.g., Birditt & Fingerman, 2005), may be more likely to use selective attention deployment to avoid looking at emotionally negative information (Mather & Knight, 2005), and may both report using reappraisal more than young adults (John & Gross, 2004; but see Beaudreau, MacKay, & Storandt, 2009; Emery & Hess, 2008) and be more effective at using reappraisal when asked to (Phillips et al., 2008). Thus, older and younger adults appear to differ in their use of regulation Expressive Regulation 7 strategies to control their inward feelings of emotion, but they appear equally able to regulate their outward expressions of emotion when asked to do so. There are, however, some limitations to the previous expressive regulation studies that limit interpretation of this finding, and serve as the inspiration for the current research. The first limitation of previous research, and the primary focus of the current study, is that none of the studies to date have examined the cognitive consequences of expressive regulation in older adults. As described in the previous section, expression regulation in young adults appears to have the cognitive consequence of reduced memory for the emotional stimuli, an effect which has previously been linked to the redirection of attention from processing the stimulus to controlling behavior. Examining subsequent stimulus memory after expressive regulation may provide evidence regarding whether the age groups differ in the strategy by which they choose to control their expressivity. For example, Magai et al. (2006) suggest that older adults, rather than relying on muscle control to reduce their expressivity, may instead choose to regulate their expression by controlling the emotional experience itself. If this is the case, older adults may show a reduced cognitive cost of expressive regulation than do young adults. In addition, in each of the previous three studies there have been baseline age differences in self-reported affect and observer ratings of emotional expressiveness. Two of the studies (Kunzman et al., 2005; Phillips et al., 2008) have asked older adults to either suppress and/or enhance their facial expressions in response to emotional films. Both of these studies found age differences during the no-regulation conditions (higher self-rated affect and more expressiveness for the young in Kunzman et al., higher self-rated affect and more expressiveness for the old in Phillips et al.), despite finding age equivalence in affect and expression during the regulation conditions. The difference in direction for the two studies is likely the result of the type of Expressive Regulation 8 materials used (disgust-evoking videos vs. social injustice videos, respectively). In the third study (Magai et al., 2006), participants were asked to recall and describe autobiographical events that made them either sad or angry; half of the participants were asked to suppress their facial responses while telling their stories. Younger adults showed more expressiveness than older adults for several emotions during both the no-regulation and the suppression conditions. In addition, older adults both reported a greater intensity of emotion and used more emotional words during the no-regulation than the suppress condition. Only one study (Kunzman et al., 2005) examined physiological responding and found that older and young adults showed similar reactivity to both suppress and enhance instructions. Although the direction of the age difference varies among the studies, these underlying baseline differences imply that regulation may have been more difficult for one age group than the other in these studies (Kunzman et al., 2005; Phillips et al., 2008). The final limitation of the previous studies is that all three studies have examined expressive regulation using only negatively valenced material. This is an important limitation for two related reasons. First, several studies have suggested that older and younger adults may have different reactions to and memory for positive and negative stimuli (e.g., Charles, Mather, & Carstensen, 2001; Mather & Knight, 2005). Specifically, older adults may show a “positivity effect”, in which they may show a bias toward processing positive stimuli and/or away from processing negative stimuli (e.g., Mather & Carstensen, 2005). It is possible, therefore, that age differences in expressive regulation may emerge in response to positive stimuli. Second, although older adults appear to have no difficulty enhancing their reactions to a negatively valenced film (Kunzmann et al., 2005), at least one recent study has shown that older adults may have difficulty enhancing their facial reactions to positive material (Henry, Rendell, Scicluna, Expressive Regulation 9 Jackson, & Phillips, 2009). The Henry et al. study found that older adults’ facial expressions in response to an amusing film were not significantly different in a no-control condition compared to an exaggerate condition. However, the Henry et al. study did not have a young adult comparison group to determine if there were significant age differences in this effect (the older adults were a control group for a group of patients with probable Alzheimer’s disease). The Current Study The current study was designed to address the limitations outlined above. The primary goal was to examine the cognitive costs of expressive suppression and enhancement in older and younger adults. To do this, we adopted the “Expressive Flexibility” paradigm used by Bonanno et al. (2004). In this within-subjects paradigm, participants are shown blocks of positive and negative pictures from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS; Lang, Bradley, & Cuthbert, 2001) under three different instructions: Suppression, Enhancement, or “Natural” viewing instructions. Each participant’s expressivity and affect during the two regulation conditions can then be compared with their own expressivity under the “natural” non-regulation condition to examine the consequences of expressive regulation. Later, participants were given a surprise recall test for the pictures presented; we could then compare recall of pictures that came from each condition to determine if expressive regulation impacted memory differently in older and younger adults. This paradigm allowed us to address the remaining limitations of previous studies that were outlined above: we chose materials that resulted in age equivalence in the “Natural” condition, and used material that was both positively and negatively valenced. Methods