When people experience emotions at levels that are not very intense, they can usually control effectively their nonverbal expressive behaviors. They can work with their emotions, to make the emotions they are experiencing clearly legible from their facial expressions, and they can work against their emotions, so as to appear nonverbally as if they are experiencing an entirely different emotion, or virtually no emotion at all. When emotions become more intense, however, attempts to work against those emotions become more problematic, and expressive control is imperiled (Studies 1- 3). People can try to control the impact of emotional experiences on emotional expressions by trying to regulate the experiencing of the emotions or the expression of them (Studies 4-5). When they are forewarned of the nature and the intensity of the emotional event that is about to occur, they can initiate those regulatory processes in advance of the emotional experience (Studies 6-8). Such anticipatory regulation will be more effective in controlling the expressive impact of moderately emotional stimuli than intense ones. There are important individual differences in the experiencing and expression of emotion, including sex differences, and these differences should moderate the impact of emotional events on expressive control, and the strategies invoked in the pursuit of that control. Intensely emotional events will be especially likely to overwhelm efforts at expressive control for people who characteristically experience their emotions deeply (high AIMs) or express them readily (high ACTs). Strategies for regulating the experiencing of emotions will be more readily and effectively evoked by high AIMS than lows, and strategies for regulating the expression of emotions will be more readily and effectively evoked by high ACTs than lows. It can be difficult for people to control their facial expressions because they cannot see their own faces. People's awareness of their facial expressions is examined in Studies 9 and 10. Studies 11 and 12 test the prediction that people who are more aware of their facial expressions will be more effective at controlling them. Study 13 examines people's ability to appear to be reacting spontaneously when in fact they are not. The ability to work with and against the emotion system in order to regulate nonverbal expressive behaviors is important to people in the helping professions such as medicine and psychotherapy, as well as to people in many everyday life situations, such as those in which their own and others' self-esteem is at risk.
