Feeling and emotional behavior repression

This study tested a premise that a repression of emotional behavioral reactions leads to an amplification of the emotional feelings. As a criterion for emotional feelings we used an emotional involvement of the participants during solving of riddle like tasks. Riddle like tasks were presented to students in groups of 6 to 10 people (n = 50) under two experimental conditions. Students in the first group were allowed to guess out loud the solution to the riddle as soon as they feel the insight to the presented problem (freely expressed insight). Students in the second group were not allowed to utter their thoughts until the experimenter told them to do so even though they might know the right answer to the riddle from the very beginning (repressed insight). After the test subjects from both groups were asked to provide their emotional feedback with 8 predetermined emotional choices. Results show that in the group with repressed insight the tasks were appraised as significantly more interesting than in other group. Moreover the tasks that the participants were unable to solve were deemed as the most ridiculous and annoying in the group with repressed insight. The same results were obtained wrt pride (n = 41) and embarrassment (n = 32). All observations confirm that emotional involvement of the participants with a temporary repression of their emotional reactions is much stronger than feelings experienced by participants from the freely expressed insight group.

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