Emotional regulation and health: individual differences in emotional expression and emotional suppression in cancer patients

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to describe the frequency of emotional suppression and emotional expressiveness in a group of cancer patients and in a control group. For this, we have evaluated two groups of adults with similar age and sex characteristics, the first one consisting of 38 cancer patients and the second of 44 not-patients. The results show that the groups differ significantly in their use of emotional suppression, in the sense that cancer patients used this strategy more often than the control group. Moreover, significant differences in terms of negative expressiveness were found, corresponding to less expression of negative emotions in cancer patients as compared to the control group, and finally, there were no significant differences in the expression of positive emotions.