Does Emotion Suppression Impair Cognitive Ability?

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.