Do High and Low Habitual Suppressors Differ in Their Momentary Expressive Suppression Effort and Success?

Expressive suppression (ES) is generally thought to be a maladaptive emotion regulation strategy because frequent ES use is associated with negative psychosocial functioning. However, these findings are typically based on trait-level questionnaires to capture ES use, and fail to capture functional features of ES use in the moment, such as effort and success, and emotion characteristics, such as intensity, that might motivate ES use. In order to assess potential differences in momentary ES effort and success, and emotional intensity, we recruited High (N = 99) and Low (N = 98) Suppressors (N = 197, 82.7% women, 13.2% men, 3.6% non-binary, 0.5% did not disclose) 17–22 years old (M_age = 18.17, SD = 0.73) who completed two 2-minute spontaneous speech tasks (most embarrassing and most proud moment) followed by video-mediated recall, where they watched their speeches and reported their emotion intensity, ES effort, and success for 10-second segments of their speech. Multilevel modeling revealed that greater intensity predicted greater ES effort and lower success, and greater effort predicted greater success. However, contrary to predictions, there were no differences between High and Low Suppressor groups in physiological arousal, emotional expression, ES effort and success, emotion intensity, and ES use based on emotional context. We discuss these results and the controversial implications of conceptualizing distinct suppressor groups, as extreme groupings from trait-level questionnaires did not correspond to any aspect of ES in the moment.