In a study done by Kleck and colleagues in 1976, participants were told to suppress facial expressions of pain during the reception of electric shocks.
Specifically, "in one study the subjects were induced to exaggerate or minimize their facial expressions to fool a supposed audience".
[4]: 27 This idea of covering up an internal experience in front of observers could be the true reason that expressive suppression is utilized in social situations.
"In everyday life, suppression may serve to conform individuals' outward appearance to emotional norms in a given situation, and to facilitate social interaction".
[6] Expressive suppression has been found to occur late after the peripheral physiological response or emotion process is triggered.
This type of emotion regulation strategy is considered a method that strongly resists various urges and voluntarily inhibits actions.
Larsen et al. (2013)[7] claim expressive suppression to be one of the less effective emotion regulation strategies.
Regarding emotion regulation, specifically expressive suppression, two groups can be characterized by their different response patterns.
Internalizers generally "show more skin conductance deflections and greater heart rate acceleration than do externalizers" when attempting to suppress facial expressions during a potentially emotional event.
[10]: 883 Srivastava and colleagues performed a study in 2009 in which the effectiveness of students' use of expressive suppression was analyzed in the transition period between high school and college.
[13][14] These researchers solidify this argument with the tradition that people are taught to count to ten when emotionally aroused to calm themselves down.
These differing views on such commonplace human behavior suggest that expressive suppression is one of the more complicated emotion-regulation techniques.
However, this assumption has gone primarily untested except for a 1979 study by Notarius and Levenson, whose research found that internalizers are more physiologically reactive to emotional stimuli than externalizers.
[3] One explanation for these findings was that when a behavioral emotional response is suppressed it must be released in other ways, in this case, physiological reactions.
[16] Many[quantify] psychotherapists will try to relieve their patients' illness/strain by teaching them expressive techniques in a controlled environment or within the particular relationship in which their suppressed emotions are causing problems.
[17] A counter-argument to this idea suggests that expressive suppression is an important part of emotional regulation that needs to be learned due to its beneficial use in adulthood.
However, then the question is whether or not to suppress all anger-related responses or to release those less volatile ones to reduce the risk of contracting physical and mental illnesses.
Only in recent studies have researchers begun looking into the effects that continual suppression of emotion in the workplace has on people.
[18] Strain elicited by such suppression can cause an elevated heart rate, increased Anxiety, low commitment, and other effects which can be detrimental to an employee.
The common conception is that expressive suppression in the workplace is beneficial for the organization and dangerous for the employee over long periods.
[19] "A potential pathway connecting parental behaviors to internalizing problems could be through adolescent expressive suppression".
[20] Expressive suppression, as an emotion regulation strategy, serves different purposes such as supporting goal pursuits and satisfying hedonic needs.
Expressive suppression is a goal-oriented strategy that is guided by people's beliefs and potentially by abstract theories about emotion regulation.
[23] In a 2012 study by Larsen and colleagues, the researchers looked at the positive association between expressive suppression and depressive symptoms among adults and adolescents which are influenced by parental support and peer victimization.
[10] The act of suppressing facial expressions prohibits others in the social world from gaining information about a suppressor's emotional state.
This can prevent a suppressor from receiving social-emotional benefits such as sympathy or sharing in collective positive and negative emotions that "facilitate social bonding".
[10] Lastly, expressive suppression is hard work and therefore requires more cognitive processing than freely communicating emotions.