Genetic and Environmental Influences on Emotion Regulation: A Twin Study of Cognitive Reappraisal and Expressive Suppression

Publication Date

8-2017

Document Type

Article

Organizational Units

College of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences, Psychology

Keywords

Heritability, Behavioral genetics, Cholesky models, Cognitive reappraisal, Emotion regulation

Abstract

Previous studies have established that personality traits related to emotionality are moderately heritable. However, the relative heritability of the strategies people use to regulate emotions is unknown. The present study compared the magnitude of additive genetic, shared environmental, and nonshared environmental influences on 2 commonly used emotion regulation strategies: cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression. In 743 twin pairs (1,486 twins), we replicated previous estimates of heritability of neuroticism (a2 = .41). Furthermore, cognitive reappraisal was significantly less heritable and more influenced by nonshared environment (a2 = .20; e2 = .80) than either neuroticism or suppression (a2 = .35; e2 = .65), another emotion regulation strategy. Finally, Cholesky decomposition modeling suggested that while there were common genetic and environmental influences on neuroticism, reappraisal and suppression, there were also significant nonshared environmental influences common between reappraisal and adaptive emotional functioning after controlling for neuroticism and suppression. These findings highlight that different aspects of emotional processing, even the use of different emotion regulation strategies, are differentially heritable. The importance of the nonshared environmental influences specific to reappraisal and adaptive emotional functioning speaks to the potential impact of social context, social partners, and psychosocial interventions on reappraisal habits.

Copyright Date

8-2017

Copyright Statement / License for Reuse

All Rights Reserved
All Rights Reserved.

Rights Holder

American Psychological Association

Provenance

Received from author

Language

English (eng)

Publication Statement

Copyright is held by the American Psychological Association. User is responsible for all copyright compliance. This article was originally published as:

McRae, K., Rhee, S. H., Gatt, J. M., Godinez, D., Williams, L. M., & Gross, J. J. (2017). Genetic and environmental influences on emotion regulation: A twin study of cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression. Emotion, 17(5), 772-777. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000300

Publication Title

Emotion

Volume

17

Issue

5

First Page

772

Last Page

777

ISSN

1931-1516

PubMed ID

28406678

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