People who try to look calm and collected while they experience strong emotions are paying a cost, according to this paper, by psychologists Jane Richards and James Gross. They showed 57 volunteers an unpleasant film of a surgical procedure. People who suppressed their emotions more later had faultier memories about what they had seen.
What happens when a whole class of people grows up under strong pressure to suppress signs of feeling? I'm not speaking of the obvious requirement that people in racist, sexist or caste-bound society are expected not to show their anger at being second-class citizens. I also mean explicit codes of conduct that say, for example, that people of your sort are to keep their eyes down, and not speak until spoken to? This is why I expect insights into emotional self-regulation by individuals (about which more here, in this article by Gross) to shed light on how whole categories of person are injured by their cultural and political environment.
