ArticlePsychosomatic medicine
Differences in Emotion Expression, Suppression, and Cardiovascular Consequences Between Black and White Americans in the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) Study.
Article in Psychosomatic medicine. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Heart rate variability and emotion regulation: Multiethnic differences in reappraisal and suppression.Emotion (Washington, D.C.) · 2026Article
- The role of social context in cognitive and neurobehavioural outcomes in epilepsy.Nature reviews. Neurology · 2026Review
- Who's at risk for emergent depression years later? Predictive modeling in a nine-year longitudinal cohort.BMC psychiatry · 2026Article
- Weathering the storm: how attachment and gender influence coping with racial discrimination.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Emotion suppression differentially moderates the link between stress and cardiovascular disease risk in Japanese and Americans.International journal of clinical and health psychology : IJCHPArticle
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
Abstract
objectiveRecent theoretical work suggests that the expression of emotions may differ among Black and White Americans, such that Black Americans engage more frequently in expressive suppression to regulate emotions and avoid conflict. Prior work has linked expressive suppression usage with increases in cardiovascular disease risk, suggesting that racialized differences in expressive suppression usage may be one mechanism by which racism "gets under the skin" and creates health disparities.
methodTo examine racialized differences in expressive suppression and blood pressure (a measure of cardiovascular disease risk), we used self-report and facial electromyography (fEMG) data from two cohorts of Black and White Americans from the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) longitudinal study (MIDUS 2, n = 271, 34.7% Black, collected from 2004 to 2009; MIDUS Refresher 1, n = 114, 31.6% Black, collected from 2012 to 2016; total N = 385, 33.9% Black).
resultsBlack Americans reported engaging in expressive suppression more frequently than White Americans ( t (260.95) = 2.18, p = .002) and showed less corrugator fEMG activity during negative images ( t (969) = 2.38, pFDR = .026). Less corrugator activity during negative images was associated with higher systolic blood pressure only for Black Americans ( b = -4.63, t (375) = 2.67, p = .008).
conclusionOverall, results are consistent with theoretical accounts that Black Americans engage more frequently in expressive suppression, which in turn is related to higher cardiovascular risk. Additional research is needed to further test this claim, particularly in real-world contexts and self-reports of in-the-moment usage of expressive suppression.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.