I work in an Aging, Cognition, and Emotion (ACE) lab where we study emotional response differences in younger and older adults. This post has similar topics relating to distraction as a poor form of emotional processing.

More specifically we've found that the most successful emotion regulators use a form of regulation called "reappraisal" in which older adults will reappraise a negative stimulus by considering all of the positive perspectives. Conversely we have found that those who distract or ignore a negative elicitor have poor emotion regulation. We measure this through psychophysiological parameters (HRV, EDA, pupil dialation).

Now our research is focusing on an even more effective emotion regulation method of embracing the "negative" affect and sitting with it...pretty interesting stuff.