College romance, for the most part, is fleeting at best. Casual hookups, one-night stands and, if you’re lucky, the occasional date, comprise the “romantic” norm on campuses. Many attribute the punctuated-equilibrium style of love to a lack of time or desire for no commitment. While both factors might contribute to the phenomenon, the issue involves a much more substantive element: emotion.
Among college students (and likely any member of Generation Z), sarcasm often trumps sincerity. Though we scoff at the hilarity of the counter-cultural hipster, it has actually become socially advantageous to throw out ironic witticisms as opposed to heartfelt confessions. In fact, the prevalence of cynicism and sardonicism, which often lacks any emotional coloring whatsoever, permeates our social interactions — from those with complete strangers to those with our best friends and significant others.
Before analyzing this cultural behavior, one needs to understand the fundamental psychology behind emotional inhibition. Everyone represses his or her emotions to some extent. In fact, everyone must do so — an individual that acts like a human mood ring wouldn’t fare too well in society. Aside from specific disorders and anomalies, emotional control never really stops; moreover, we get better at it with experience.
In terms of neuroanatomy, the most recent research points to the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC — region of the brain immediately behind the forehead), the anterior cingulate cortex and the anterior insular cortex as structural correlates for emotional regulation; all three regions tend to be bigger in people who have more emotional control. Furthermore, the latter two domains work in tandem to generate a subjective self-awareness: The insular cortex processes interoception, or the sensitivity to physical stimuli, while the cingulate cortices attach emotional salience to that sensitivity.
However, emotional control is a vague notion; brand-new research, therefore, works to negotiate any ambiguity. Researchers have differentiated two basic emotional regulatory strategies: expressive suppression and emotional reappraisal. Suppression involves the actual inhibition of emotional response and behavior, while reappraisal is more of a cognitive reevaluation.
Swiss neuroscientists at the University of Geneva looked not only at how these two strategies differentially activate the brain (via frontal magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI), but also at how these activations changed with the context or valence of the stimulus (one of 240 possible images). The images depicted either a social or nonsocial context and a positive or negative valence. They found that the strategy used by the subject completely changed the brain response to negative, social and nonsocial stimuli.
The obvious question, then, is whether one brain response is better than the other. The latest neuroscience research suggests that the answer is often “yes.”
Expressive suppression has been tied to the emotional devaluation of faces (inhibition tended to yield a lower trustworthiness rating of the face), longer smoking histories (as opposed to those of smokers who utilized reappraisal) and even depression. Emotional regulation is also linked to working memory capacity, or the ability to process information while distracted or engaged in a separate task.
However, while reappraisal has many psychological benefits, the strategy itself is not always beneficial. Taken to its extreme, for example, reappraisal of grief as joy can be immoral, or even psychopathic. People who utilize emotional reappraisal, moreover, tended to accept unfair offers more than those who regulated their emotions differently, according to a University of Arizona study — reappraising too much, then, generates a sort of “pushover” persona.
The reappraisal mechanism ultimately allows the individual to survive emotionally — without it, we would be plagued by various mood disorders like depression.
The ideal form of emotional control is always in flux: Sometimes we need to reconsider our emotions about a situation, sometimes we do not, and sometimes it’s simply easier to cut ourselves off from emotion. Maintaining a balance is both a conscious and unconscious effort, and, while metacognition (thinking about thinking) more often than not improves our mental well-being, excessive rumination about the most instinctual recesses of our minds will likely be counter-productive.
You should probably do some soul-searching, though, if your idea of an emotionally honest relationship is the general awkwardness of asking who the naked person in your bed is when you wake up hungover on a Sunday morning.
Caitlin Gilbert is a junior in the College. THE CORTEXT appears every other Tuesday.
