Longitudinal Observational Evidence of the Impact of Emotion Regulation Strategies on Affective Expression

The ability to regulate our emotions plays an important role in our psychological and physical health. Regulating emotions influences how and when emotions are expressed. We performed a large scale, longitudinal observational study to investigate the effect of emotion regulation ability on expressed affect. We found that expression of negative affect increased throughout the day. For people who suppress emotion this increase is slower that for those who do not. For those with stronger cognitive reappraisal abilities, though not significant, there was a trend for higher positive affect and negative affect increased significantly less steeply, suggesting that they might experience more positive and less negative affect. These results reflect some of the first results based on large scale, continuous tracking of behavioral expression of emotion longitudinally. Our results demonstrate the need to carefully consider the time of day and emotion regulation ability, in addition to gender and age, when attempting to automatically infer affective states for facial behavior.