we were also able to examine whether the memory deficits associated with suppression mightalso be observed following expressive enhancement. Richards and Gross (2000) suggested thisdeficit was due to the cognitive load associated with suppressing. We assumed that expressive
enhancement would also tax cognitive resources and therefore produce a similar memory deficit.Second, we examined the ability to regulate emotional expression upward and downwardas a prospective predictor of long-term adjustment in a sample of New York City college
students. Many students experience at least some increase in distress during the transition tocollege life (Gerdes & Mallinckrodt, 1994). The students in the current study began college in
New York City just prior to the September 11th terrorist attacks, and this transition was likely tohave been particularly difficult for students with poor emotion-regulation skills. On the basis ofthe assumption http://www.ukthesis.org/thesis_sample/shehuixuexinlixue/that the ability to flexibly enhance and suppress the expression of emotionpromotes adaptation, we predicted that greater ability to perform these tasks soon after beginningcollege would be correlated with betteradjustment by the end of the second year in college.
METHOD
Subjects and ProcedureWithin 1 month after beginning college, 101 New York City undergraduates (67 female,
34 male; mean age = 18.05 years, SD = 0.59) completed a 32-item version of the Symptom
Checklist-90-Revised (Derogatis, 1983) as a measure of initial (T1) distress. One to 3 monthslater, these subjects participated individually in an expressive-regulation experiment. Long-termadjustment was assessed by repeating the distress measure at the end of the second academicyear (T2). Fourteen subjects (14%) dropped out of the study before T2, leaving 87 subjects forlongitudinal analyses. Subjects who dropped out did not differ from remaining subjects on anyvariable measured in this study (p > .15). Subjects were paid $250 for each year they
participated.
For the expressive-regulation task, subjects were seated before a desktop computer andfilmed from a one-way mirror positioned above their line of vision. They were instructed in howto interact with software that displayed blocked sequences of five digitized picture stimuli
selected from the International Affective Picture System (Lang, Bradley, & Cuthbert, 1995).College-student norms (Lang et al., 1995) were used to balance stimuli for valence and arousalacross blocks. Within each block, each stimulus was presented for 10 s, with 4 s between stimuli.
For practice, subjects viewed randomly presented blocks of positive or negative stimuli, andfollowing each block rated the degree to which they felt “negative emotion (e.g., anger,revulsion, sadness, distress),” by typing a number between 1 (no negative emotion) and 7(extreme negative emotion), and then the degree to which they felt “positive emotion (e.g.,happiness, joy, amusement, interest),” using a similar scale.
