Does Emotion Suppression Impair Cognitive Ability?

Thu, 03 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

As we age the cognitive abilities and mechanisms associated with processing speed, executive functioning, inhibitory control, and working memory show relative declines; despite these declines, however, older adults are much more proficient at regulating their emotions and emotional behaviors—an experience that often requires the coordination of cognitive resources to achieve. The current project was conducted to understand whether effortful emotion regulation, specifically the suppression of negative emotion, was more cognitively taxing for young adult participants (between the ages of 18-30) than for older adult participants (above the age of 60). Data was collected online using CloudResearch and Prolific. This project was completed as one of two side projects of the DARCI Project and functioned as my PhD dissertation research topic.

Research question: Does aging impact how emotion regulation relates to processing speed performance? Regulating one’s emotions, especially suppression of an emotional response, requires cognitive resources to complete and is a process that involves constant monitoring and updating. Thus, while suppressing emotional experiences and behavior subsequent (i.e., concurrent) cognitive task performance should suffer due to overlapping/shared mental resources. Additionally, different outcomes were hypothesized for older compared to younger adults—specifically that the degree of impairment on subsequent cognitive tasks due to effortful emotion regulation usage would be greater for younger adults.

The dissertation project was successfully defended on April 3rd, 2025 and the manuscript was submitted as a preprint to PsyArXiv via the Open Science Framework.

The DARCI Project

Mon, 20 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The goal of this multi-study research project was the assessment of the psychological constructs of Crystallized Intelligence (i.e., general knowledge) and Fluid Intelligence (i.e., reasoning) data as well as novel data on adult Rationality (i.e., good thinking) among age groups of younger and older adults. This is one of the first online efforts to gather this type of individual differences data, and the establishment of the underlying structure of responses for both young and older adult participants would be a first for Intelligence and Rationality data of this sort. We were also interested in whether tasks that measure Rationality share more variance with tests of Crystallized Intelligence or Fluid Intelligence. Manuscripts are in-progress for this research.

Fluid Intelligence | Dr. Schmank's Academic Website

Does Emotion Suppression Impair Cognitive Ability?

The DARCI Project