title: Impacts of suppression on emotional responses and performance outcomes: an experience-sampling study in younger and older workers.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  Past studies have demonstrated that older adults used less emotional suppression to regulate their emotions than did younger adults, but the effectiveness of using this emotion regulatory strategy on psychosocial well-being across age remains largely unexplored. The present study adopted an experience-sampling method to examine whether the impacts of momentary employment of emotional suppression on momentary positive and negative emotions and job performance would be different by age.
  
  
  METHODS
  Eighty-seven Chinese insurance workers, aged between 18 and 61 years, participated in a 5-day sampling study. Their affective responses at work, momentary task performance, and sales productivity were recorded.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Results showed that older workers' greater use of suppression at work was associated with lower intensity of negative emotions, whereas such association was not found among younger workers. Moreover, greater use of suppression over the sampling period was significantly predictive of sales productivity of older workers, but such a positive association was not shown in younger workers.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  These findings reveal that the use of suppression at work may be more effective for older workers than for younger workers.
authors.affiliation: Department of Applied Social Studies, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong, China. dannii.yeung@cityu.edu.hk
authors.forename: Dannii Y
authors.initials: DY
authors.lastname: Yeung
authors.forename: Helene H
authors.initials: HH
authors.lastname: Fung
mesh_terms: D000223:Adaptation, Psychological; D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D003132:Commerce; D004650:Employee Performance Appraisal; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010549:Personal Satisfaction; D012094:Repression, Psychology; D012494:Sampling Studies; D020377:Self Efficacy; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D055815:Young Adult