Posted September 29, 2014 by Tristan Colasito

“Didn’t you and ____ break up last week? How’re you holding up?”

“I’m fine! Let’s drink later, on me.”

“I failed the last exam. Damn, I’m feeling really down.”

Do any of these sound familiar? How do you deal with your emotions? How do you cope with negative feelings? Do you ignore them and do other activities to distract yourself? Or do you accept these feelings and talk about them? A study published this year suggests that the latter is a better way of dealing with heavy emotions.

A survey was done on over 2000 participants in order to measure their emotional awareness and to identify their coping strategies. In the study, two kinds of coping strategies were considered, namely reappraisal and suppression. Reappraisal would pertain to accepting and reinterpreting emotions, while suppression would pertain to ignoring or getting rid of the emotions. Results showed that being able to express emotions verbally was linked to a more adaptive coping strategy which is reappraisal. Additionally, the results showed that those who use reappraisal as an emotional regulation strategy have reported less negative emotions.

A psychologist and blogger tries to explain the results by suggesting that when we suppress a feeling, we would start to think of the unpleasant experience as a threat that needs to be avoided; and because of this, we lose our tolerance for negative emotions, thus not being able to handle them well. On the other hand, when we reappraise an emotion, we recognize the emotion and then reinterpret them possibly making the experience a less stressful and more pleasant one.

He then ends the blog entry by saying:

“I guess we should start paying more attention to our emotions instead of ignoring or supressing them. Let’s start right now… what do you feel?”

Blog entry: http://reflectd.co/2014/09/27/people-who-are-consciously-aware-of-their-emotions-deal-with-them-more-effectively-study-shows/

To know more about the study, read: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0091846

Photo taken from: wikipedia.org

Source: Subic-Wrana, C., Beutel, M.E., Brahler, E., Stobel-Richter, Y., Knebel, A., Lane, R.D., & Wiltink, J., (2014). How is Emotional Awareness Related to Emotion Regulation Strategies and Self-Reported Negative Affect in the General Population. Plos One, 9(3), pp. 1-10.