Emotion, Control, Stress and Health - Article Example

Emotion, Control, Stress and HealthThe aim of the study was to examine the relationship between four types of emotional control to perceived stress and psychological and physical health complaints. The four types of emotional control were rehearsal or rumination, emotional inhibition, aggressive control and benign or impulse control. The study hypothesized that rehearsal and emotional inhibition would be related to greater perceived stress and higher levels of health complaints and that aggressive control and benign control would be related to lower perceived stress and lower levels of health complaints.

327 Singaporean adults (168 males, 158 females and 1 unknown) participated in the study. They were friends, acquaintances and students who were randomly given the questionnaires. There were five instruments used to gather the data:The Emotive control questionnairePerceived stress scale – measured the extent to which they perceived events in their life to be stressfulHassles scale- measured the occurrence of items that hassled them in the past monthPennebaker inventory of limbic languidness- measured their physical symptoms and sensations e.g. chest pains and nauseaHopkins symptom checklist- measured the prevalence of psychological symptoms such as anxiety, depress and obsessive-compulsive tendencies.

The results showed that in fact emotional control is significantly related to stress and health complaints. But not all four aspects were significantly related to both stress and health complaints. Rehearsal and benign control were related to greater perceived stress, whereas emotional inhibition was related to lower levels of perceived stress. Rehearsal was the only aspect that related to higher levels of health complaints. There was no significant correlation with levels of health complaints with the other three aspects.

The interpretation of the results suggests that rehearsal is not an adaptive form o f emotion and stress control. Controlling emotions (benign control) is an adaptive form of control and is associated with lower responses to stress and more positive health and social outcomes. The results for emotional inhibition showed that it may be adaptive in some cases and it is not as healthy to inhibit emotions as suggested by some previous research studies. The study and its results inspire several thoughts.

Firstly, it is interesting to see research being done on the relationship between not simply emotions, but the different aspects of emotional control, and stress and health. It is useful to have such information on the various aspects of emotional control to understand what exactly about emotions affects stress and health.The result for emotional inhibition inspires thoughts of the role of culture in emotional release work. This study was done with Singaporean adults and so the notion of showing or releasing emotions in public or even with someone else may not be culturally acceptable.

However were this study done in some western cultures where emotional inhibition is in fact considered harmful to the person the results may indeed be different. Finally, I agree with the authors that longitudinal data would add immensely to this body of knowledge regarding emotional control and health. Sometimes the stress caused by inhibiting emotions takes time to be manifested in the body. Also the manifestations may not be confined to chest pains and nausea, so that longitudinal research that covers other health effects would be worthwhile.

ReferenceLok, C. & Bishop, G.D. (1999). Emotion, control, stress and health. Psychology and Health. 14, 813-827