Emotion Regulation of Others and Self

Men are from Mars, women are from Venus?

Posted on Mar 26, 2010 by Miriam Samad

My partner sat looking at me with an amused expression on his face as I complained about the dull task I was currently engaged in - namely transcribing audio recordings of interviews. Although the interviews themselves were very interesting (exploring the emotion regulation strategies that people use to regulate their own and others emotions), the task of transcribing them at my pace of three hours of transcribing for every 10 minutes of recording – was less thrilling.

“How long do they last for?” my partner asked. I explained that the interview I was currently working on wasn’t actually that long. It was a male participant who had talked for only 25 minutes of the allocated one hour slot about his emotion regulation strategies.

“25 minutes?!” came my partner’s somewhat horrified response, “what could anyone have to say about their emotions that could last for 25 minutes?” I patiently explained (while worrying that I was actually sharing my life with a Neanderthal), that 25 minutes was quite a short amount of time to discuss all the emotion regulation strategies that one may engage in, and that the women we had interviewed so far tended to talk for about 45 minutes on their emotion regulation strategies.

We then entered into a discussion about the strategies that my partner might use to regulate his own, (and more importantly), my, emotions. “I don’t really do anything” he said. I told him that this wasn’t true and pointed out instances where he had cooked dinner, put our daughter to bed, done the housework etc in a bid to reduce my stress levels. “Yeah but I don’t really want to hear about your worries” he said, “If I can see that you’re upset, I’ll ask you if you’re alright, but I just want you to say that you’re fine so I can carry on with what I’m doing”.

I then countered this by saying (in a superior tone) that if he was upset, I would want him to be able to talk to me about it, to share his feelings with me and to seek comfort in me. “What’s the point of that?” came his reply, “you just have to deal with emotions, if there’s a problem that can be solved you need to solve it, and if not you need to forget about it, there’s no point worrying about something when you can’t change it”.

Although I was now starting to get annoyed with him, and found that words such as ‘cold’, ‘heartless’ and ‘cave-man’, were spilling from my lips, I couldn’t help but wonder about the adaptive/maladaptive nature of our respective approaches towards emotion regulation. While I feel that I am very ‘in-touch’ with my own emotions, and the emotions of those I care about, (and thus credit myself with having high emotional intelligence), I also know that I worry excessively, I get easily stressed, and feel anxious about numerous things at any one point in my life.

Conversely, my cave-man partner who claims to not have any emotion regulation strategies, and certainly seems to me to be lacking in awareness of his own and other’s emotions, is a very calm, happy, care-free person who genuinely believes that he can deal with anything that life throws at him. I very rarely see him angry or upset, and when I do, he seems to experience the emotion for a very short period of time, deal with it, and move on. I have to admit that I’m actually jealous of his approach to emotion regulation, and wish that I could experience emotions, or deal with them, in the way that he does.

I then began thinking about whether this difference between myself and my partner was something specific to us as a couple, or whether we represented more universal differences between males and females.  Indeed, Nolen-Hoeksema (1987), found that women were more likely to focus on the emotional aspects of stressful experiences, discuss their emotional experiences with others, and engage in rumination than men were, while Garnefski et al (2004) found that women tended to use rumination, positive refocusing and catastrophizing more often than men. In our current emotion regulation study, which asks participants to keep an ‘emotions’ diary for a week before coming for an interview to discuss their emotions and their emotion regulation strategies, we have had far more women volunteering to take part than men. When we have had men come forward, they have tended to report being less aware of other’s emotions, using less strategies to regulate their own and other’s emotions, and have also tended to talk for approximately half the amount of time that women do about their emotions.

A recent study by Zlomke and Hahn (2010) looked at the cognitive emotion regulation processes used by men and women, and the relationship between such strategies and worry. They found that when faced with a stressful situation, women utilised rumination and putting the situation into perspective more often than men, while men were more likely to use the strategy of blaming others. In addition, the authors found that another emotion regulation strategy, entitled ‘Refocus on Planning’ was negatively related to worry in men. Those men who reported increased thinking about how to handle a negative event (perhaps a practical response to stress) reported lower levels of anxiety, stress and worry. Across the sample as a whole, the strategies of rumination and catastrophizing were strongly related to increased stress and excessive worry, suggesting that such strategies were maladaptive.

When we first began recruiting for our emotion regulation study, we did not anticipate having any problems in recruiting men. It did not enter our minds that men may be more reluctant to talk about their emotions than women would be, and we did not plan to explore gender differences in emotion regulation strategies. However, given the interesting differences that are already emerging in our data, we will now definitely be examining gender differences in emotion regulation, and will present these findings at this summer’s annual BABCP conference at the University of Manchester. So if you find that your male and female friends differ in their emotion regulation strategies, or indeed, like me, that yourself and your partner differ, then keep your eyes peeled on our website, hopefully we’ll have some interesting insights to report soon!

Miriam Samad - University of Manchester

Back to blog