Emotion Regulation Test: See Whether You Lean on Reappraisal or Suppression

The process model of emotion regulation, in plain words

James Gross's process model describes an emotion as something that unfolds over a few seconds rather than arriving all at once: a situation comes up, you pay attention to some part of it, you interpret what it means, and only then do the feeling, the bodily response, and the expression follow. Each of those points is a place where you can step in. You can choose or change the situation, shift your attention, change the interpretation, or manage the response once it is already there. The model's central claim, supported by many experiments since, is that where you intervene matters: strategies that act early, before the emotion is fully formed, generally cost less and work better than strategies that act late.

Reappraisal is an early strategy. It changes the interpretation, which changes the feeling at its source, so there is less to manage afterward. Suppression is a late strategy. It acts on the expression after the feeling already exists, which means the feeling keeps running underneath, the body stays activated, and part of your attention is spent on the effort of hiding it. This test scores the two habits separately because they are genuinely independent: in Gross and John's original samples the correlation between them was close to zero, which is why your result can be high on both or low on both rather than simply one or the other.

Why reappraisal predicts better wellbeing, and the cultural caveat

In the 2003 study that introduced the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire, people who habitually reappraised reported more positive emotion, less negative emotion, closer relationships, and higher wellbeing, while people who habitually suppressed reported the reverse, including feeling less authentic and less close to others. Laboratory studies filled in the mechanism: suppression does not reduce the negative feeling, it raises physiological arousal, it impairs memory for what happened during the conversation, and it makes partners feel less connected. A 2010 meta-analysis across many conditions found reappraisal weakly protective and suppression moderately associated with anxiety, depression, and other difficulties. These are averages across large groups, and effect sizes are modest; they describe tendencies, not destinies.

The caveat matters. Butler, Lee and Gross showed in 2007 that the social costs of suppression were clearest among people holding Western-European values, and smaller or absent among people holding bicultural or East Asian values, where moderating emotional expression is part of considerate behavior rather than a sign of hiding. Later cross-cultural reviews have reached similar conclusions. If you grew up in a culture or a family where keeping feelings private is a form of respect, a high suppression score is not the same thing it would be for someone raised to express everything, and the question becomes whether the habit still serves you and whether you can choose it rather than defaulting to it.

Practicing reappraisal

Reappraisal is a skill, and a learnable one; it is a core part of cognitive behavioral therapy and most of its descendants. The practical version has three moves. First, catch the interpretation: when a feeling arrives, ask what you just told yourself the situation meant. Second, generate one alternative that is also true: not a comforting lie, but another reading that the facts support, such as that a short reply might mean busy rather than angry, or that a mistake is information rather than a verdict. Third, decide which reading to act from. With practice this happens in seconds and often before the feeling is fully formed, which is exactly the point of an early strategy.

Two things make it easier. Noticing the thought in the first place is helped by the attention skills measured in our Mindfulness Test, and the most common unhelpful interpretations have names, which our cognitive distortions guide lists with examples. If you find you cannot tell what you are feeling in the first place, reappraisal has nothing to work on; our Alexithymia Test looks at that specific difficulty. And if the problem is less the strategy than the intensity, with emotions arriving so fast and hard that no strategy gets a chance, our Emotional Dysregulation Test is the better starting point.

When suppression is the right tool, and what to do next

Suppression is not a flaw. There are situations in which hiding what you feel is exactly right: staying composed during a medical emergency, not laughing at a funeral, keeping a steady face while a frightened child watches you, holding your reaction in a negotiation until you have decided what to do with it. Research on flexible regulation suggests that what predicts good outcomes is not avoiding suppression altogether but being able to choose it when the situation calls for it and set it down afterward. The costly pattern is suppression as the only tool, applied to every feeling, including the pleasant ones, with nobody ever seeing what is actually going on inside.

Whatever your result, the next step is the same in shape. If reappraisal leads, keep it and check whether you ever use it to talk yourself out of feelings that deserve a hearing. If suppression leads, find one person and one feeling you could stop hiding this week, and practice the three reappraisal moves on something small. If both are high, you are working hard on your emotions from both ends, and the question is whether the hiding is still necessary once the rethinking has done its job. If both are low, you reported relatively little use of these two strategies. You may use other approaches, such as acceptance, problem solving, changing a situation, or seeking support; this questionnaire does not measure regulation as a whole. Our Coping Styles Test looks at the wider set of strategies you reach for under stress, and a therapist who works with emotions can help you build the one you are missing.

If your concern is taking on other people's feelings, Emotional Contagion Test: How Much You Catch Others' Feelings explores that experience separately from how you regulate your own emotions.

Methodology & sources

This test is an original educational screener informed by James Gross's process model of emotion regulation and by the research tradition around the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ; Gross and John, 2003), the standard 10-item research measure of cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression. We did not reproduce the ERQ: every statement here was written for this page and then checked line by line against all ten published ERQ items, so none of them repeats or paraphrases one. The 16 statements, eight for each strategy, are our own writing, each describing one concrete habit in plain language, and they are rated on a seven-point agreement scale scored 1 to 7, which mirrors the format researchers typically use for these constructs.

Each strategy is scored as a percentage of its own maximum, and the leading strategy is reported with the other shown alongside it; because the two are independent in the research, the interpretation reads the combination rather than only the winner. There are no reverse-scored items, and there are no clinical cutoffs: this is a screening tool for self-reflection, not the validated ERQ and not a diagnosis of any condition. Validation findings for the ERQ do not establish the accuracy of this version, and the research associations described on this page are group averages with modest effect sizes, not predictions about any one person.

Reviewed by Michael Callans, MSW
Reviewed the two strategy scales so that suppression is described as a late and costly default rather than a character flaw, with the cultural caveat kept in the interpretation. Last reviewed October 5, 2026.

References

1. Gross JJ, John OP. Individual differences in two emotion regulation processes: Implications for affect, relationships, and well-being. J Pers Soc Psychol. 2003;85(2):348-362. doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.85.2.348
2. Gross JJ. The emerging field of emotion regulation: An integrative review. Rev Gen Psychol. 1998;2(3):271-299. doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.2.3.271
3. Butler EA, Lee TL, Gross JJ. Emotion regulation and culture: Are the social consequences of emotion suppression culture-specific? Emotion. 2007;7(1):30-48. doi.org/10.1037/1528-3542.7.1.30
4. Aldao A, Nolen-Hoeksema S, Schweizer S. Emotion-regulation strategies across psychopathology: A meta-analytic review. Clin Psychol Rev. 2010;30(2):217-237. doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2009.11.004

Emotion Regulation Test: Reappraisal vs Suppression FAQ