The British Psychological Society reports on how people regulate their emotions.

They report that according to new research published in the journal Emotion, a person’s ability to regulate or not regulate their emotions has a big impact on the level of anxiety they feel.

This new research purports that individuals who adopt an emotional regulation strategy called reappraisal often suffer from less general and social anxiety than those who fail to express their feelings openly.

Nicole Llewellyn, a graduate student from the University of Illinois, explained the reappraisal strategy as one that sees people thinking about things in a more positive light, adding: “You sort of re-frame and reappraise what’s happened and think what are the positives about this?“  Individuals who follow this approach will often consider how an issue can be a seen as a stimulating challenge as opposed to a problem.

FarsNews.com reports on a related study, conducted by British researchers, that shows that different brain areas are activated when we choose to suppress an emotion compared to when we are instructed to inhibit an emotion.

Dr. Simone Kuhn of Ghent University and colleagues scanned the brains of healthy participants and found that key brain systems were activated when choosing to suppress an emotion. They had previously linked this brain area to deciding to inhibit movement.

“This result shows that emotional self-control involves a quite different brain system from simply being told how to respond emotionally,” Kuhn, the lead author, reported.

He went on to note, “We should distinguish between voluntary and instructed control of emotions, in the same way as we can distinguish between making up our own mind about what do, versus following instructions.”

This study published in Brain Structure and Function had fifteen healthy women view unpleasant or frightening pictures. The participants were given a choice to feel the emotion elicited by the image, or alternatively to inhibit the emotion, by distancing themselves through an act of self-control.

The researchers further delineated, “Most studies of emotion processing in the brain simply assume that people passively receive emotional stimuli, and automatically feel the corresponding emotion. In contrast, the area we have identified may contribute to some individuals’ ability to rise above particular emotional situations.”

 What are Your Thoughts on this new Emotion Regulation Information?

Forget where you put your car keys? Need to remember an important phone number?

AARP.org suggests that you make a  nonverbal gesture: a fist.

In a recent study, published in the journal PLoS One,entitled “Getting a Grip on Memory” making a fist was found to be helpful in trying to remember information.

Psychologist Ruth Propper, Ph.D., of Montclair State University in New Jersey writes how clenching your right hand for 90 seconds will help you memorize facts.  In addition to clenching your right hand, she found that clenching your left hand for the same amount of time will help you recall those facts.

Propper asked 51 right-handed subjects to memorize 72 words and randomly assigned each person to one of five hand-clenching groups or a control group that did nothing (Lefties were left out because, according to the study, they do better on “episodic memory tasks,” such as recalling memorized words, which gives them an unfair advantage).

She found the best combination for better memory and recall occurs when a subject clenches his right hand while memorizing, and balls up his left hand while trying to recall the memory.  This is because the as many of us already know the right side of our brain controls the left side of our body and vice a versa.

“It’s almost 15% better [to clench right then left] than to just sit there doing nothing,” she told NBC News,  “[Fifteen percent] could be the difference between an A and a C on a test.”

NBC News.com reports on wrinkles making people look sadder and madder than they truly feel.  This new study suggests that wrinkles impede people’s ability to read a person’s facial expression of  emotion.

Researchers reported that people in the study rated faces of older adults as much more sad and angry than faces of younger adults even though they were exhibiting  neutral facial expressions.

More research is needed; however, to confirm these findings but the implications of such a study has a wide range.  These findings may affect how our older generations are treated in medical settings.  For instance, doctors may misperceive an older individual to be in more pain or anguish than they truly are.

The researchers found that there was no link between the level of sadness or anger participants thought older adults experienced in real life and their ratings of the faces.

Carlos Garrido,  researcher and doctoral student in social psychology at Penn State University states that wrinkles on the face can cause the mouth to drop and the forehead to crinkle, features that others may misperceive as anger or sadness.

In a similar article from HealthCanal.com, boys more so than girls were found to be able to perceive depression in their parents even when the parent thinks they are not showing any signs.

A University of Michigan Study finds that children who have one parent suffering from depression are skilled at picking up on their parent’s sadness.  Researchers analyzed data on 104 children ages 7-13 who had at least one parent diagnosed with depression.

Nester Lopez-Duran, one of the study’s authors and an assistant psychology professor said that high-risk boys were more sensitive to subtle expressions of sadness than their peers, including high-risk girls.  He notes that this can be due to a few things:

1.  Boys are less social than girls in important situations.  Perhaps high sensitivity to sadness influences how boys see their social world (i.e. they are less apt at using others as sources of comfort when they are sad).

2.  Other evidence points to the fact that different underlying processes that put kids at risk for depression may be different for boys than girls.

3.  It’s also possible that this unique skill does not reflect an underlying vulnerability and might be an adaptive strategy that develops in response to the environment. That is boys are more likely to receive harsh punishment and parental depression increases the risk of using harsh punishment.
“It is possible that these high-risk boys developed this skill in order to reduce the possibility of getting harsh punishment by essentially recognizing when mom or dad is upset and getting out of the way,” Lopez-Duran said.

Do you agree or disagree with the findings of this study?