Spontaneous emotion regulation during evaluated speaking tasks: Associations with negative affect, anxiety expression, memory, and physiological responding.

In these studies, the correlates of spontaneously using expressive suppression and cognitive reappraisal during stressful speeches were examined. Spontaneous emotion regulation means that there were no instructions of how to regulate emotions during the speech. Instead, participants indicated after the speech to what extent they used self-motivated expressive suppression or reappraisal during the task. The results show that suppression is associated with less anxiety expression, greater physiological responding, and less memory for the speech while having no impact on negative affect. In contrast, reappraisal has no impact on physiology and memory while leading to less expression and affect. Taken together, spontaneous emotion regulation in active coping tasks has similar consequences as experimentally induced emotion regulation in passive tasks. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Emotion regulation and vulnerability to depression: Spontaneous versus instructed use of emotion suppression and reappraisal.

Emotion dysregulation has long been thought to be a vulnerability factor for mood disorders. However, there have been few empirical tests of this idea. In this study, we tested the hypothesis that depression vulnerability is related to difficulties with emotion regulation by comparing recovered-depressed and never-depressed participants (N = 73). In the first phase, participants completed questionnaires assessing their typical use of emotion regulation strategies. In the second phase, sad mood was induced using a film clip, and the degree to which participants reported to have spontaneously used suppression versus reappraisal to regulate their emotions was assessed. In the third phase, participants received either suppression or reappraisal instructions prior to watching a second sadness-inducing film. As predicted, suppression was found to be ineffective for down-regulating negative emotions, and recovered-depressed participants reported to have spontaneously used this strategy during the first sadness-inducing film more often than controls. However, the groups did not differ regarding the effects of induced suppression versus reappraisal on negative mood. These results provide evidence for a role for spontaneous but not instructed emotion regulation in depression vulnerability. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Emotion regulation and decision making under risk and uncertainty.

It is well established that emotion plays a key role in human social and economic decision making. The recent literature on emotion regulation (ER), however, highlights that humans typically make efforts to control emotion experiences. This leaves open the possibility that decision effects previously attributed to acute emotion may be a consequence of acute ER strategies such as cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression. In Study 1, we manipulated ER of laboratory-induced fear and disgust, and found that the cognitive reappraisal of these negative emotions promotes risky decisions (reduces risk aversion) in the Balloon Analogue Risk Task and is associated with increased performance in the prehunch/hunch period of the Iowa Gambling Task. In Study 2, we found that naturally occurring negative emotions also increase risk aversion in Balloon Analogue Risk Task, but the incidental use of cognitive reappraisal of emotions impedes this effect. We offer evidence that the increased effectiveness of cognitive reappraisal in reducing the experience of emotions underlies its beneficial effects on decision making. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Look before you regulate: Differential perceptual strategies underlying expressive suppression and cognitive reappraisal.

Successful emotion regulation is important for maintaining psychological well-being. Although it is known that emotion regulation strategies, such as cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression, may have divergent consequences for emotional responses, the cognitive processes underlying these differences remain unclear. Here we used eye-tracking to investigate the role of attentional deployment in emotion regulation success. We hypothesized that differences in the deployment of attention to emotional areas of complex visual scenes may be a contributing factor to the differential effects of these two strategies on emotional experience. Eye-movements, pupil size, and self-reported negative emotional experience were measured while healthy young adult participants viewed negative IAPS images and regulated their emotional responses using either cognitive reappraisal or expressive suppression. Consistent with prior work, reappraisers reported feeling significantly less negative than suppressers when regulating emotion as compared to a baseline condition. Across both groups, participants looked away from emotional areas during emotion regulation, an effect that was more pronounced for suppressers. Critically, irrespective of emotion regulation strategy, participants who looked toward emotional areas of a complex visual scene were more likely to experience emotion regulation success. Taken together, these results demonstrate that attentional deployment varies across emotion regulation strategies and that successful emotion regulation depends on the extent to which people look toward emotional content in complex visual scenes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Emotion regulation in schizophrenia: Affective, social, and clinical correlates of suppression and reappraisal.

Individuals can exert considerable control over their experience and expression of emotion by applying different regulatory strategies such as reappraisal and suppression. However, although it has been suggested that blunted affect in schizophrenia, characterized by markedly reduced emotion expressivity alongside apparently normal emotion experience, may reflect overuse of suppression, no study to date has assessed self-reported use of these different emotion regulatory strategies in relation to this disorder. In the present study, 41 individuals with schizophrenia and 38 control participants completed a self-report measure that differentiated between use of suppression and reappraisal. Symptom severity and various aspects of cognitive and psychosocial functioning were also assessed. Relative to controls, individuals with schizophrenia did not differ with regard to their reported use of suppression and reappraisal, and reported use of both strategies was unrelated to clinical ratings of blunted affect. However, whereas (lower) use of reappraisal was associated with greater social function impairment for both groups, only for controls was (greater) use of suppression associated with reduced social functioning. Implications for understanding blunted affect and social dysfunction in schizophrenia are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Implicit theories of emotion: Affective and social outcomes across a major life transition.

The authors demonstrate that people differ systematically in their implicit theories of emotion: Some view emotions as fixed (entity theorists), whereas others view emotions as more malleable (incremental theorists). Using a longitudinal and multimethod design, the authors show that implicit theories of emotion, as distinct from intelligence, are linked to both emotional and social adjustment during the transition to college. Before entering college, individuals who held entity (vs. incremental) theories of emotion had lower emotion regulation self-efficacy and made less use of cognitive reappraisal (Part 1). Throughout their first academic term, entity theorists of emotion had less favorable emotion experiences and received decreasing social support from their new friends, as evidenced by weekly diaries (Part 2). By the end of freshman year, entity theorists of emotion had lower well-being, greater depressive symptoms, and lower social adjustment as indicated in both self- and peer-reports (Part 3). The emotional, but not the social, outcomes were partially mediated by individual differences in emotion regulation self-efficacy (Part 4). Together, these studies demonstrate that implicit theories of emotion can have important long-term implications for socioemotional functioning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Discrete emotions predict changes in cognition, judgment, experience, behavior, and physiology: A meta-analysis of experimental emotion elicitations.

Our purpose in the present meta-analysis was to examine the extent to which discrete emotions elicit changes in cognition, judgment, experience, behavior, and physiology; whether these changes are correlated as would be expected if emotions organize responses across these systems; and which factors moderate the magnitude of these effects. Studies (687; 4,946 effects, 49,473 participants) were included that elicited the discrete emotions of happiness, sadness, anger, and anxiety as independent variables with adults. Consistent with discrete emotion theory, there were (a) moderate differences among discrete emotions; (b) differences among discrete negative emotions; and (c) correlated changes in behavior, experience, and physiology (cognition and judgment were mostly not correlated with other changes). Valence, valence–arousal, and approach–avoidance models of emotion were not as clearly supported. There was evidence that these factors are likely important components of emotion but that they could not fully account for the pattern of results. Most emotion elicitations were effective, although the efficacy varied with the emotions being compared. Picture presentations were overall the most effective elicitor of discrete emotions. Stronger effects of emotion elicitations were associated with happiness versus negative emotions, self-reported experience, a greater proportion of women (for elicitations of happiness and sadness), omission of a cover story, and participants alone versus in groups. Conclusions are limited by the inclusion of only some discrete emotions, exclusion of studies that did not elicit discrete emotions, few available effect sizes for some contrasts and moderators, and the methodological rigor of included studies. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

The unconscious regulation of emotion: Nonconscious reappraisal goals modulate emotional reactivity.

People often encounter difficulty when making conscious attempts to regulate their emotions. We propose that nonconscious self-regulatory processes may be of help in these difficult circumstances because nonconscious processes are not subject to the same set of limitations as are conscious processes. Two experiments examined the effects of nonconsciously operating goals on people’s emotion regulatory success. In Experiment 1, participants engaged in an anxiety-eliciting task. Participants who had a reappraisal emotion control goal primed and operating nonconsciously achieved the same decrease in physiological reactivity as those explicitly instructed to reappraise. In Experiment 2, the effect of nonconscious reappraisal priming on physiological reactivity was shown to be most pronounced for those who do not habitually use reappraisal strategies. The findings highlight the potential importance of nonconscious goals for facilitating emotional control in complex real-world environments and have implications for contemporary models of emotion regulation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Acceptability and suppression of negative emotion in anxiety and mood disorders.

The present study investigated perceived acceptability and suppression of negative emotion in participants with anxiety and mood disorders. Sixty participants with these disorders and 30 control participants watched an emotion-provoking film and completed self-report measures of their experience and regulation of emotions. The film elicited similar increases in negative emotion for clinical and nonclinical participants; however, clinical participants judged their resulting emotions as less acceptable and suppressed their emotions to a greater extent. The higher level of suppression in the clinical group was attributable to females in the clinical group suppressing their emotions more than females in the nonclinical group. For all participants, high levels of suppression were associated with increased negative emotion during the film and during a postfilm recovery period. Further analyses showed that appraising emotions as unacceptable mediated the relationship between negative emotion intensity and use of suppression in the clinical group. This study extends the literature on emotion regulation to a clinical sample and suggests that judging emotions as unacceptable and suppressing emotions may be important aspects of the phenomenology of emotional disorders. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The Tie That Binds? Coherence Among Emotion Experience, Behavior, and Physiology.

Emotion theories commonly postulate that emotions impose coherence across multiple response systems. However, empirical support for this coherence postulate is surprisingly limited. In the present study, the authors (a) examined the within-individual associations among experiential, facial behavioral, and peripheral physiological responses during emotional responding and (b) assessed whether emotion intensity moderates these associations. Experiential, behavioral, and physiological responses were measured second-by-second during a film that induced amusement and sadness. Results indicate that experience and behavior were highly associated but that physiological responses were only modestly associated with experience and behavior. Intensity of amusement experience was associated with greater coherence between behavior and physiological responding; intensity of sadness experience was not. These findings provide new evidence about response system coherence in emotions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Antecedent- and response-focused emotion regulation: divergent consequences for experience, expression, and physiology

Using a process model of emotion, a distinction between antecedent-focused and response-focused emotion regulation is proposed. To test this distinction, 120 participants were shown a disgusting film while their experiential, behavioral, and physiological responses were recorded. Participants were told to either (a) think about the film in such a way that they would feel nothing (reappraisal, a form of antecedent-focused emotion regulation), (b) behave in such a way that someone watching them would not know they were feeling anything (suppression, a form of response-focused emotion regulation), or (c) watch the film (a control condition). Compared with the control condition, both reappraisal and suppression were effective in reducing emotion-expressive behavior. However, reappraisal decreased disgust experience, whereas suppression increased sympathetic activation. These results suggest that these 2 emotion regulatory processes may have different adaptive consequences.     

Using reappraisal to regulate unpleasant emotional episodes: Goals and timing matter.

The hypothesis that cognitive reappraisal will have different effects on emotion as a function of regulatory goal and the timing with which reappraisals are enacted within an emotion episode was tested. Forty-one participants reappraised situations depicted in unpleasant pictures by imagining those situations getting worse (increase), staying the same (maintain), or getting better (decrease). Reappraisal instructions were delivered 2 s before (anticipatory) or 4 s after (online) picture onset. Measures of rated unpleasantness, expressive behavior (corrugator muscle activity), heart rate (HR), and electrodermal activity (EDA) were collected. Increase reappraisals produced higher rated unpleasantness, corrugator muscle activity, HR, and EDA relative to maintain reappraisals. For corrugator muscle activity and EDA, the effect of increase reappraisals was only apparent when enacted online. Decrease reappraisals produced lower rated unpleasantness relative to maintain reappraisals but had no effect on expressive behavior or autonomic physiology. The effect of decrease reappraisals did not depend on when reappraisal was enacted. These data underscore the importance of regulatory goals and the impact of regulatory timing as a moderator of emotion regulatory success within an emotion episode. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Age differences in poignancy: Cognitive reappraisal as a moderator.

Poignancy is defined as a mixed emotional experience that arises when one faces meaningful endings. According to socioemotional selectivity theory (Carstensen, 2006), when people are aware of the finitude of time, they tend to experience more poignancy. In Study 1, we found that Chinese younger, but not older, participants experienced more poignancy under time limitations. In Study 2, we found that an emotion regulation strategy—namely, cognitive reappraisal—moderated the relationship between limited time and poignancy, such that the increases in poignancy under time limitations were found only among older Chinese participants with lower levels of cognitive reappraisal but not among those with higher levels of cognitive reappraisal. These findings contribute to the existing literature on poignancy by showing that not every older adult exhibits poignancy in the face of an ending: The poignancy phenomenon may occur among only older adults who are less likely to use an emotion regulation strategy, such as cognitive reappraisal, to reinterpret the anticipated ending. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Diminished self-conscious emotional responding in frontotemporal lobar degeneration patients.

Frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) is a neurodegenerative disease that dramatically alters social and emotional behavior. Recent work has suggested that self-conscious emotions (e.g., embarrassment) may be particularly vulnerable to disruption in this disease. Self-conscious emotions require the ability to monitor the self in relation to others. These abilities are thought to be subserved by brain regions (e.g., medial prefrontal, anterior cingulate, and insula) that are particularly vulnerable to damage in FTLD. This study examined emotional responding (expressive behavior, peripheral physiology, and subjective experience) in 24 FTLD patients and 16 cognitively normal control participants using a karaoke task known to elicit self-conscious emotion reliably and a nonemotional control task (isometric handgrip). Results indicated that FTLD patients showed diminished self-conscious emotional behavior (embarrassment and amusement) and diminished physiological responding while watching themselves singing. No differences were found between patients and controls in the nonemotional control task. These findings offer evidence of marked disruption of self-conscious emotional responding in FTLD. Diminished self-conscious emotional responding likely contributes significantly to social inappropriateness and other behavioral abnormalities in FTLD. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of aging on experimentally instructed detached reappraisal, positive reappraisal, and emotional behavior suppression.

Emotion regulation includes multiple strategies that rely on different underlying abilities and that may be affected differently by aging. We assessed young, middle-aged, and older adults’ ability to implement 3 emotion regulation strategies (detached reappraisal, positive reappraisal, and behavior suppression) in a laboratory setting, using standardized emotional stimuli and a multimethod approach to assessing regulation success. Results revealed age-related decline in ability to implement detached reappraisal, enhancement of ability to implement positive reappraisal, and maintenance of ability to implement behavior suppression. We discuss these findings in terms of their implications for emotion theory and for promoting successful aging. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Dissociable effects of conscious emotion regulation strategies on explicit and implicit memory.

The authors manipulated emotion regulation strategies at encoding and administered explicit and implicit memory tests. In Experiment 1, participants used reappraisal to enhance and decrease the personal relevance of unpleasant and neutral pictures. In Experiment 2, decrease cues were replaced with suppress cues that directed participants to inhibit emotion-expressive behavior. Across experiments, using reappraisal to enhance the personal relevance of pictures improved free recall. By contrast, attempting to suppress emotional displays tended to impair recall, especially compared to the enhance condition. Using reappraisal to decrease the personal relevance of pictures had different effects depending on picture type. Paired with unpleasant pictures, the decrease cue tended to improve recall. Paired with neutral stimuli, the decrease cue tended to impair recall. Emotion regulation did not affect perceptual priming. Results highlight dissociable effects of emotion regulation on explicit and implicit memory, as well as dissociations between regulation strategies with respect to explicit memory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The regulatory function of self-conscious emotion: Insights from patients with orbitofrontal damage.

Although once considered disruptive, self-conscious emotions are now theorized to be fundamentally involved in the regulation of social behavior. The present study examined the social regulation function of self-conscious emotions by comparing healthy participants with a neuropsychological population--patients with orbitofrontal lesions--characterized by selective regulatory deficits. Orbitofrontal patients and healthy controls participated in a series of tasks designed to assess their social regulation and self-conscious emotions. Another task assessed the ability to infer others' emotional states, an appraisal process involved in self-conscious emotion. Consistent with the theory that self-conscious emotions are important for regulating social behavior, the findings show that deficient behavioral regulation is associated with inappropriate self-conscious emotions that reinforce maladaptive behavior. Additionally, deficient behavioral regulation is associated with impairments in interpreting the self-conscious emotions of others. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Individual differences in two emotion regulation processes: Implications for affect, relationships, and well-being.

Five studies tested two general hypotheses: Individuals differ in their use of emotion regulation strategies such as reappraisal and suppression, and these individual differences have implications for affect, well-being, and social relationships. Study 1 presents new measures of the habitual use of reappraisal and suppression. Study 2 examines convergent and discriminant validity. Study 3 shows that reappraisers experience and express greater positive emotion and lesser negative emotion, whereas suppressors experience and express lesser positive emotion, yet experience greater negative emotion. Study 4 indicates that using reappraisal is associated with better interpersonal functioning, whereas using suppression is associated with worse interpersonal functioning. Study 5 shows that using reappraisal is related positively to well-being, whereas using suppression is related negatively. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Business or pleasure? Utilitarian versus hedonic considerations in emotion regulation.

It is widely accepted that emotions have utilitarian as well as hedonic consequences. Nevertheless, it is typically assumed that individuals regulate emotions to obtain hedonic, rather than utilitarian, benefits. In this study, the authors tested whether individuals represent the utility of pleasant and unpleasant emotions and whether they would be motivated to experience unpleasant emotions if they believed they could be useful. First, findings revealed that participants explicitly viewed approach emotions (e.g., excitement) as useful for obtaining rewards, but viewed avoidance emotions (e.g., worry) as useful for avoiding threats. Second, this pattern was replicated in implicit representations of emotional utility, which were dissociated from explicit ones. Third, implicit, but not explicit, representations of emotional utility predicted motives for emotion regulation. When anticipating a threatening task, participants who viewed emotions such as worry and fear as useful for avoiding threats preferred to engage in activities that were likely to increase worry and fear (vs. excitement) before the task. These findings demonstrate that utilitarian considerations play an important, if underappreciated, role in emotion regulation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)