Faulty reasoning signals

• Confirmation Bias - 8.4% (80 hits)
• Anchoring Bias - 1.6% (15 hits)
• Availability Heuristic - 6.6% (63 hits)
• Representativeness Heuristic - 6.8% (65 hits)
• Hindsight Bias - 1.3% (12 hits)
• Overconfidence Bias - 17.8% (170 hits)
• Framing Effect - 7.3% (70 hits)
• Loss Aversion - 8.6% (82 hits)
• Status Quo Bias - 8.2% (78 hits)
• Sunk Cost Effect - 0%
• Optimism Bias - 10.9% (104 hits)
• Pessimism Bias - 3.9% (37 hits)

Article text

Three Rules to Guide How You Show Your Emotions

Everyone has different attitudes toward the public display of emotions.

Anna is prone to crying in front of others when she encounters a sad situation, regardless of who those “others” happen to be.

This has gotten her somewhat in trouble when the people she expresses these emotions to prefer to maintain their emotional equanimity.

If you were Anna’s friend, what advice would you give her?

Display Rules for Emotions

Every society has its so-called “display rules” for whether it’s okay or not to show your feelings.

According to Australian National University’s Conal Monaghan and colleagues (2026), display rules are “a vital ingredient for successful social interaction.”

You are expected, according to these rules, to restrain or express your feelings to fit the “normative expectations” of whatever situation you happen to be in (p.

439).

By definition, the norms that govern your emotional expression are particular to your own culture.

Anna’s tendency to cry would violate display rules if she let the tears flow when she’s at work, but not if it happens when she’s with her loved ones.

But what if the emotions she expressed were positive, such as letting others know, even at work, that she’s happy?

Assuming she doesn’t explode in uproarious and loud laughter at a remark that's not funny, this emotional expression might not create so many problems for her.

The Australian research team wanted to learn if there is a certain structure to display rules based on the nature of the emotions and the nature of the social situation.

To do this, they set out to develop a new scale that would capture people’s views of which emotions should be expressed or suppressed, and under what conditions.

Their scale, which they called the Expression Regulation Scale (ERS), could then serve as a basis for guiding people like Anna so that they avoid social embarrassment or worse, ostracism.

Testing Your Expression Regulation

Using a sample of online residents of the United Kingdom (average age 46 years old), the authors first explored the structure of a potential ERS from an initial set of 64 items covering four situations: private-close, private-distant, public-close, and public-distant.

As an example of private-close, the respondents indicated “how you think you should express emotions in private (in either your own home or someone else’s) with people very close to you (for example, family and close friends).”

With these instructions available onscreen, participants then used a visual scale running from -100 to 100, indicating how much they would express each emotion (e.g., express no emotion to express much more than they feel).

After subjecting these ratings to statistical analysis, the research team then narrowed the list of emotions from 64 to 24, representing three sets of eight emotions, falling into three categories, as follows:

Affiliative- admiration, compassion, delight, excitement, happiness, hope, pleasure, pride.

Disruptive- anger, boredom, disgust, fury, hatred, irritation, jealousy, resentment.

Vulnerable- despair, distress, embarrassment, fear, guilt, hurt, sadness, unhappiness.

Using ratings of the three sets of emotions in the four types of situations, Monaghan et al. arrived at a final set of expressive norms, which are as follows:

Rule #1: It is fine to express your affiliative feelings to the extent you feel them, or even more strongly.

It doesn’t matter if you’re in a public or private situation, or with people you know well or those you don’t.

Rule #2: Beware of expressing your disruptive emotions.

You may get away with this when you’re in private with someone you know well, but in general, the rule is suppress, suppress, suppress.

Rule #3: Keep those vulnerable emotions to yourself as well.

You’ll be less penalized in a close private situation and perhaps even close public, but you’ll be judged negatively if you do so with people you don’t know very well, whether in a private or public situation.

The most egregious violation of display rules in this sample occurred with the expression of disruptive emotions in public with people you don’t know well.

In other words, don’t start a shouting match in the middle of a crowded shopping mall if someone accidentally gets in your way.

Putting the Display Rules to Use

We can now see why Anna’s outburst would be considered so inappropriate.

The Australian study shows that the expression of vulnerable emotions, even in the presence of people who know you, falls into negative territory in terms of acceptability.

On the other hand, she would be given a great deal of slack if she let loose a loud laugh, maybe even louder than other people, in the context of her work colleagues.

Some problems could arise, though, in the expression of vulnerable emotions even with people who know you well.

Letting close personal friends or partners know you’re afraid, guilty, hurt or sad could be considered a slight violation of the rules.

But, then, you might ask, what do you do if your romantic partner says something (unintentionally) that taps into your insecurities?

Must you suppress these feelings of vulnerability?

In interpreting their findings, the authors offer one possible way out of this bind.

You can let your partner know you’re feeling hurt.

As they note, “in close-private relationships, individuals may exhibit more relaxed and unfiltered expressions, while also making efforts to maintain positive social impressions to nurture these relationships” (p.

453).

In other words, express your feelings of being sad or hurt but bracket this expression in the larger context of the love you feel for your partner.

To sum up, knowing how and with whom to express your emotions may require somewhat of a juggling act.

When you put these three display rules into effect you will get the most fulfilling outcomes.