Regulating Emotions About Secrets

Secrecy is common and psychologically costly. Research shows that secrets have high emotional stakes, but no research has directly tested how people regulate their emotions about secrets. To fill this gap, we conducted an experimental study (Study 1), then moved to studying secrecy ‘in the wild’ to capture regulatory processes as they unfold in everyday life (Studies 2 and 3). In Study 1 (N=498), people reported using putatively maladaptive strategies to regulate emotions about secrets compared to matched non-secrets. In two daily diary studies (N Study 2=174, 1059 surveys; N Study 3=240, 2764 surveys), participants reported engaging in acceptance, distraction, and expressive suppression most—and social sharing least—to manage emotions about secrets. Moreover, in testing which kinds of secrets required most regulation, Study 3 suggested that significant, negative, and socially harmful secrets were associated with greater use of maladaptive strategies like rumination and suppression, while secret immorality, discoverability, and controllability did not differentially predict regulation strategies. Our findings indicate that when regulating emotions about their secrets, people appear to prioritize their intention to keep secret information hidden, despite the well-being costs of enacting this intention. Thus, the regulation profile of secrecy does not appear to be an adaptive one, though our findings do point to potential methods of managing secrets in more beneficial ways.