How Do You Handle Your Emotions?
Two strategies that feel the same from inside and are not
When a feeling arrives that you would rather not have, there are two main things people do with it. One is to change how you see the situation so that the feeling changes. The other is to keep the feeling and stop it showing. Both count as being in control, and both look identical to an observer. The research found they are not remotely equivalent: the first goes with more positive emotion and closer relationships, and the second with less positive emotion, more negative emotion, and people around you feeling that they do not quite know you.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
Twelve questions about what you do with feelings, not about how strong they are. Answer about an ordinary month.
What it measures
The two strategies in the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire. Reframing is changing the meaning of a situation before the feeling has fully formed. Holding it in is keeping the feeling and hiding the expression. Most people use both; the balance between them is what predicts wellbeing.
Based on: Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (Gross & John, 2003)
Possible results
Reframing
Changing what the situation means before the feeling sets.
Holding it in
Keeping the feeling and hiding the expression.
Common questions
Is not showing emotion the same as being calm?
No, and the difference is measurable. In the laboratory, people told to hide their reaction to something upsetting showed the same internal arousal as people who showed it - sometimes more - while looking perfectly composed. The feeling was fully present; only the display was gone. Calm is what you get from the first bar, where the situation genuinely means something less threatening. Composure from the second bar is a performance running on top of an unchanged feeling, and performances are tiring.
How is this different from the coping test?
Coping is what you do about a stressful situation - solve it, get support, take distance. This is narrower and earlier: what you do with the feeling itself, in the moment it arrives, regardless of what you later do about the cause. Someone can be an excellent problem-solver and still hold every feeling in, and the second habit will cost them in ways the first cannot fix.
Sources
- Gross, J. J., & John, O. P. (2003). Individual differences in two emotion regulation processes: Implications for affect, relationships, and well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
An honest note This is a short adaptation of the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire, which is one of the most used instruments in this field and has held up well across languages. Two honest limits. The findings on suppression come mainly from Western samples, and later work has found that holding feelings in carries a much smaller cost in cultures where restraint is expected and valued - what is expensive is not suppression itself but suppression that is out of step with the people around you. And the two strategies are not the whole picture: people also regulate emotion by choosing situations, by distracting themselves, and by simply accepting a feeling, none of which is measured here. A high second bar is not a diagnosis of anything; it describes a habit, and habits of this kind change.