What is it about?
We all regulate our emotions in different ways. For example, we might change how we think about a situation to change how we feel, or we might hide what we are feeling from others. But are these everyday habits related only to how we feel in the moment, or also to our well-being years later? We analyzed data based on a nationally representative sample of nearly 5,000 adults in Taiwan over eight years. We found that people who more often reappraised situations—changing how they thought about something in order to change how they felt—tended to have higher well-being, both generally and years later. In contrast, people who more often hid positive emotions tended to have lower well-being. Hiding negative emotions, however, showed little consistent relationship with well-being. These patterns were found across people’s evaluations of their lives, their emotional experiences, and their perceived physical health.
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Why is it important?
Emotions are often short-lived, but the ways people habitually manage them may be linked to well-being over much longer periods of time. Most previous studies have examined emotion regulation over relatively short time periods or in specific groups, such as university students. Our study followed a large, nationally representative adult sample for eight years and used statistical models that separated people’s stable levels of well-being from changes at particular points in time. The findings also highlight an important distinction that is often overlooked: hiding positive and negative emotions may not have the same implications for well-being. Suppressing positive emotions was consistently associated with poorer well-being, whereas suppressing negative emotions was not. Although observational, our findings suggest that understanding how people manage emotions may be important for research and interventions aimed at promoting well-being over the long term.
Perspectives
What I find most interesting about this work is the contrast between how fleeting emotions can be and how enduring their regulation may be associated with well-being. I was also particularly struck by the difference between suppressing positive and negative emotions. Suppression is often treated as a single strategy that is simply “bad” for well-being, but our findings suggest a more nuanced story: hiding positive emotions was consistently associated with lower well-being, while hiding negative emotions was not. More broadly, I hope this work encourages researchers to study emotion regulation across longer periods of adulthood, to distinguish between different kinds of emotional expression, and to examine these processes in populations beyond the Western samples that have traditionally dominated this literature.
Felix Yu
Northwestern University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Emotion regulation is associated with trait-like and future well-being across 8 years., Emotion, August 2026, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/emo0001723.
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