(PS2-B27) Emotion Suppression Increases the Frequency of Negative Emotion and Decreases the Frequency of Positive Emotion in Controls but Not Those with GAD

Recent work from our lab has established methods for discretizing multivariate idiographic time series into discrete states that are generalizable across persons (Lazarus et al., under review). Specifically, we are able to define negative affect (NA) states and positive affect (PA) states that, although dummy coded, account for approximately 50% of the variance in continuous input data. Moreover, we have showed that these states are transportable—that equivalent variance can be accounted for in external samples (see, https://psyarxiv.com/4nxqh).

The promise of this work is to use these states in new samples in order to investigate momentary theories of psychological functioning. One such set of theories pertains to how individuals regulate their emotion moment to moment.

The proposed poster will demonstrate how discrete emotion states can be employed in time series data for N=45 individuals with major depressive disorder (MDD) and generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) and N=35 nonclinical control participants who provided data four times per day for 30 days (average number of observations = 113). We examined how emotion regulation strategies reported prior to ecological momentary assessment (EMA) predicted variation in daily emotion expression during the assessment period. We found that control participants exhibited a strong positive correlation between endorsements of suppression at baseline and the frequency of NA events during EMA and a strong negative correlation between suppression and the frequency of PA events during EMA. For individuals with GAD, there was no relationship between suppression and emotion, indicating that suppression does not appear to increase the frequency of NA events or decrease the frequency of PA events. These results provide support for extant theories that propose that individuals with GAD maintain negative emotionality in order to guard against or prevent variance in emotional experiences.