Divergent cognitive costs for online forms of reappraisal and distraction.

The present study was set out to evaluate the cognitive costs of two major emotion regulation strategies under conditions of increased challenge. Previous studies have established that cognitive reappraisal (construing an emotional event in nonemotional terms) has no cognitive costs. However, in all of these studies, reappraisal was initiated at the emotional situation onset, before emotional response tendencies sufficiently evolved. In the present study, the challenge of regulation strategies was increased by initiating strategies online at a late time point in an emotional situation. Applying this procedure revealed for the first time a cognitive cost for reappraisal and also provided double dissociation between reappraisal and another major cognitive emotion regulation strategy--distraction (diverting attention from an emotional situation via producing neutral thoughts). Specifically, late reappraisal, relative to distraction, resulted in an expenditure of self control resources. Late distraction but not reappraisal impaired memory encoding of the emotional situation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

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)     

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)     

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)     

Differential subjective and psychophysiological responses to socially and nonsocially generated emotional stimuli.

Sociality may determine the subjective experience and physiological response to emotional stimuli. Film segments induced socially and nonsocially generated emotions. Comedy (social positive), bereavement (social negative), pizza scenes (nonsocial positive), and wounded bodies (nonsocial negative) elicited four distinct emotional patterns. Per subjective report, joy, sadness, appetite, and disgust were elicited by the targeted stimulus condition. The social/nonsocial dimension influenced which emotional valence(s) elicited a skin conductance response, a finding that could not be explained by differences in subjective arousal. Heart rate deceleration was more responsive to nonsocially generated emotions. Taken together, these findings suggest that sociality affects the physiological profile of responses to emotional valence. (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 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)     

Seeing, thinking, and feeling: Emotion-regulating effects of gaze-directed cognitive reappraisal.

Cognitive reappraisal (CR) is an emotion-regulatory (ER) process that is theorized to operate via changes in appraisals. CR is distinct from attentional deployment (AD), an ER process that is theorized to operate via changes in attention. However, a recent neuroimaging study has suggested that the ER effects of CR might largely be explained by AD. In this study, I manipulated CR while holding visual AD constant across CR conditions. In a randomized within-subjects design, 54 participants used CR to increase and decrease emotion in response to unpleasant pictures. This was compared with simply viewing the pictures. On all trials, gaze was directed to a circumscribed area of the pictures. Even with gaze held constant across conditions, increase reappraisals led to higher ratings of emotional intensity, greater corrugator activity, and greater autonomic arousal. In addition, decrease reappraisals led to lower ratings of emotional intensity and lower corrugator activity, the latter of which held only when gaze was directed to arousing information. Overall, the results suggest that changes in appraisal are the likely mechanism for the ER effects of CR. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Affective learning increases sensitivity to graded emotional faces.

How does the affective significance of emotional faces affect perceptual decisions? We manipulated affective significance by pairing 100% fearful faces with aversive electrical stimulation and hypothesized that increasing the significance of a stimulus via its prior history would lead to enhanced processing. After fear conditioning, participants viewed graded emotional faces that ranged from neutral to fearful. Faces were shown either in a color that was previously paired with shock or a color not paired with shock during conditioning. Increases in the frequency of "fearful" responses for faces shown in the shock-paired color were most robust for faces at intermediate intensity levels (40-60% fearful). Psychometric fits to the data revealed significant increased sensitivity for shock-paired relative to unpaired faces. Thus, despite identical physical features for shock-paired and unpaired stimuli (aside from the color, which was counterbalanced), more frequent (and faster) "fearful" responses were made when participants viewed affectively significant stimuli. (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)     

Psychological distance and emotional experience: What you see is what you get.

Recent research suggests that perceiving negative emotion-eliciting scenes approaching intensifies the associated felt emotion, while perceiving emotion-eliciting scenes receding weakens the associated felt emotion (Muhlberger, Neumann, Wieser, & Pauli, 2008). In the present studies, we sought to extend these findings by examining the effects of imagining rather than perceiving such changes to negative emotion-eliciting scenes. Across three studies, we found that negative scenes generally elicited less negative responses and lower levels of arousal when imagined moving away from participants and shrinking, and more negative responses and higher levels of arousal when imagined moving toward participants and growing, as compared to the responses elicited by negative scenes when imagined unchanged. Patterns in responses to neutral scenes undergoing the same imagined transformations were similar on ratings of emotional arousal, but differed on valence—generally eliciting greater positivity when imagined moving toward participants and growing, and less positivity when imagined moving away from participants and shrinking. Moreover, for these effects to emerge, participants reported it necessary to explicitly imagine scenes moving closer or farther. These findings have implications for emotion regulation, and suggest that imagined spatial distance plays a role in mental representations of emotionally salient events. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Convergent and divergent responses to emotional displays of ingroup and outgroup.

In the present research, we test the assumption that emotional mimicry and contagion are moderated by group membership. We report two studies using facial electromyography (EMG; Study 1), Facial Action Coding System (FACS; Study 2), and self-reported emotions (Study 2) as dependent measures. As predicted, both studies show that ingroup anger and fear displays were mimicked to a greater extent than outgroup displays of these emotions. The self-report data in Study 2 further showed specific divergent reactions to outgroup anger and fear displays. Outgroup anger evoked fear, and outgroup fear evoked aversion. Interestingly, mimicry increased liking for ingroup models but not for outgroup models. The findings are discussed in terms of the social functions of emotions in group contexts. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cognitive reappraisal of negative affect: Converging evidence from EMG and self-report.

Prior psychophysiological studies of cognitive reappraisal have generally focused on the down-regulation of negative affect, and have demonstrated either changes in self-reports of affective experience, or changes in facial electromyography, but not both. Unfortunately, when taken separately, these measures are vulnerable to different sources of bias, and alternative explanations might account for changes in these indicators of negative affect. What is needed is a study that (a) obtains measures of self-reported affect together with facial electromyography, and (b) examines the use of reappraisal to regulate externally and internally generated affective responses. In the present study, participants up- or down-regulated negative affect in the context of both negative and neutral pictures. Up-regulation led to greater self reports of negative affect, as well as greater corrugator and startle responses to both negative and neutral stimuli. Down-regulation led to lesser reports of negative affect, and lesser corrugator responses to negative and neutral stimuli. These results extend prior research by (a) showing simultaneous effects on multiple measures of affect, and (b) demonstrating that cognitive reappraisal may be used both to regulate responses to negative stimuli and to manufacture a negative response to neutral stimuli. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Specifying emotional information: Regulation of emotional intensity via executive processes.

The degree of specificity at which emotional information is activated might determine evoked emotional intensity. However, the nature of this effect remains unclear. Four studies tested (a) whether people hold the na?ve theory that activating specific details of emotional information arouses acute feelings; (b) whether an emotionally distressed population (social phobics) also holds that theory; and (c) whether voluntarily focusing on specific aspects of a distressing situation reduces its emotional impact. Results indicate that control as well as emotionally distressed people hold a na?ve theory that specifying emotion increases its intensity. However, Studies 3 and 4 showed that voluntarily elaborating specific aspects of a distressing situation reduces distress. Results are discussed in terms of voluntary versus automatic processing of emotional information. (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)     

Aging and goal-directed emotional attention: Distraction reverses emotional biases.

Previous findings reveal that older adults favor positive over negative stimuli in both memory and attention (for a review, see Mather & Carstensen, 2005). This study used eye tracking to investigate the role of cognitive control in older adults' selective visual attention. Younger and older adults viewed emotional-neutral and emotional-emotional pairs of faces and pictures while their gaze patterns were recorded under full or divided attention conditions. Replicating previous eye-tracking findings, older adults allocated less of their visual attention to negative stimuli in negative-neutral stimulus pairings in the full attention condition than younger adults did. However, as predicted by a cognitive-control-based account of the positivity effect in older adults' information processing tendencies (Mather & Knight, 2005), older adults' tendency to avoid negative stimuli was reversed in the divided attention condition. Compared with younger adults, older adults' limited attentional resources were more likely to be drawn to negative stimuli when they were distracted. These findings indicate that emotional goals can have unintended consequences when cognitive control mechanisms are not fully available. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Modulations of the electrophysiological response to pleasant stimuli by cognitive reappraisal.

Research indicates that individuals successfully regulate their emotions to negatively valenced stimuli using cognitive, antecedent-focused techniques (cf. Gross, 1998). Event-related potential studies have elucidated candidate neural correlates, particularly modulations of the late positive potential (LPP) to index emotion regulation processes. The present study attempted to extend prior demonstrations of emotion regulation effects on the LPP to the domain of positively valenced stimuli. Twenty participants completed a blocked emotion regulation task: The first block consisted of passively viewing pleasant and neutral pictures, whereas the last two blocks consisted of either decreasing or increasing emotions to pleasant pictures. Results replicated our previous findings with negatively valenced stimuli, demonstrating an attenuated LPP during decrease instructions and no effect of increase instructions. Modulation of the ERP as a function of instruction was most prominent during the positive-going slow-wave time window of the LPP, indicating that attentional resources allocated to the perceptual processing of pleasant stimuli may be manipulated using emotion regulation strategies. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Seeing the silver lining: Cognitive reappraisal ability moderates the relationship between stress and depressive symptoms.

Individuals differ in their adjustment to stressful life events, with some exhibiting impaired functioning, including depression, while others exhibit impressive resilience. The present study examined the hypothesis that the ability to deploy a particularly adaptive type of emotion regulation—cognitive reappraisal—may be a protective factor. It expands upon existing research in three ways. First, participants' ability to use reappraisal (cognitive reappraisal ability: CRA) was measured by using a behavioral challenge that assessed changes in experiential and physiological domains, rather than questionnaires. Second, all participants had been exposed to one or more recent stressful life events, a context in which emotion regulation may be particularly important. Third, a community sample of 78 women aged 20 to 60 was recruited, as opposed to undergraduates. Results indicate that, at low levels of stress, participants' CRA was not associated with depressive symptoms. However, at high levels of stress, women with high CRA exhibited less depressive symptoms than those with low CRA, suggesting that CRA may be an important moderator of the link between stress and depressive symptoms. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Age and emotional experience during mutual reminiscing.

In the present article, the authors examined age differences in the emotional experiences involved in talking about past events. In Study 1, 129 adults in an experience-sampling study reported whether they were engaged in mutual reminiscing and their concurrent positive and negative emotion. Their experiences of positive and negative emotion during mutual reminiscing were compared with emotional experience during other social activities. Age was associated with increasing positive emotion during mutual reminiscing. In Study 2 (n=132), the authors examined emotions during reminiscing for specific positive and negative events. In this case, age was associated with improved emotional experiences but only during reminiscing about positive experiences. Findings are discussed in terms of socioemotional selectivity theory and the literature on reminiscence and life review. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)