Longitudinal associations between expressive suppression and psychological health: The moderating role of authenticity and the ambivalence over emotion expression.

Expressive suppression is defined as the inhibition of emotional display and has been consistently linked with poorer psychological health. However, little research has explored individual differences in individual-centered factors that may mitigate these negative health effects. The social-cognitive processing model (Lepore, 2001) suggests that restricting emotional expression leads to psychological maladjustment when individuals experience social constraints. Building on this theory, we contend that two individual-centered factors-low ambivalence over emotion expression (i.e., less internal conflict about expressing emotions) and high subjective authenticity (i.e., a strong sense of alignment with one's true self)-may buffer against the harmful effects of expressive suppression. As such, the present study examines (a) the main effects of expressive suppression on psychological health prospectively and (b) whether authenticity and ambivalence over emotional expression, respectively, moderate the prospective relationship between expressive suppression and psychological health. Four hundred eighty-three first-year college students (Mage = 17.89, SD = 0.58; 69.92% female) from a large private university in the Northeast United States completed two online surveys at the beginning (T1) of the Fall 2020 semester and at the end of the semester 14 weeks later (T2). Controlling for demographic factors, T1 expressive suppression predicted greater levels of T2 depressive and T2 anxiety symptoms and lower levels of T2 life satisfaction. Moreover, authenticity buffered the link between T1 expressive suppression and T2 psychological health outcomes such that the T1 expressive suppression only predicted poorer T2 psychological health among individuals with low authenticity but not among those with high authenticity. Similarly, ambivalence over emotion expression moderated the link between T1 expressive suppression and T2 life satisfaction such that T1 expressive suppression did not predict poorer T2 life satisfaction among individuals with low ambivalence over emotion expression. Our findings highlight the importance of considering individual differences in understanding when expressive suppression is more or less maladaptive. Specifically, internal social-cognitive factors, such as feeling conflicted about emotion expression and authenticity, serve as important moderators of expressive suppression effects. This underscores the importance of moving away from broad generalizations that expressive suppression is universally harmful across contexts and individuals. These insights have important clinical implications. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).