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)     

Mood regulation in depression: Differential effects of distraction and recall of happy memories on sad mood.

Recent research suggests that the recall of positive memories plays an important role in mood regulation. In this study, the authors examined the ability of currently depressed, formerly depressed, and never-depressed participants to regulate sad mood through the recall of positive memories or through distraction. Although improvement in mood was found for all participants in response to distraction, under instructions to recall positive memories, never-depressed participants' moods improved, whereas formerly depressed participants' sad moods remained unchanged. It is important to note that depressed participants exhibited a worsening of their sad moods after recalling positive memories. These results suggest both that depression is associated with an impaired ability to use positive recall to regulate a sad mood and that this impairment continues to be evident following recovery. (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)     

Preventive resources and emotion regulation expectancies as mediators between attachment and college students' stress outcomes.

In this study the authors examined both preventive psychological coping resources and negative mood regulation expectancies as potential mediators between parental attachment and two types of stress outcomes: stress symptoms and stress-produced emotions. Data were collected from 390 college students and separate structural equation models were tested for the outcomes of stress symptoms and emotions. Results suggested that for both models, as hypothesized, preventive resources and negative mood regulation expectancies functioned as mediators. Further, there was evidence that these results were similar for the model in which stress symptoms were used as an outcome, as well as the model in which stress-produced emotions were used as the outcome. Implications for a more complete understanding of psychological resources promoted by secure attachment are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attention control, memory updating, and emotion regulation temporarily reduce the capacity for executive control.

This research tested the hypothesis that initial efforts at executive control temporarily undermine subsequent efforts at executive control. Four experiments revealed that controlling the focus of visual attention (Experiment 1), inhibiting predominant writing tendencies (Experiment 2), taking a working memory test (Experiment 3), or exaggerating emotional expressions (Experiment 4) undermined performance on subsequent tests of working memory span, reverse digit span, and response inhibition, respectively. The results supported a limited resource model of executive control and cast doubt on competing accounts based on mood, motivation, or task difficulty. Prior efforts at executive control are a significant contextual determinant of the operation of executive processes. (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)     

Autobiographical memory specificity and affect regulation: An experimental approach.

This study investigated J. M. G. Williams's (1996) affect-regulation hypothesis that level of specificity of autobiographical memory (AM) is used to minimize negative affect. It was found that a negative event leads to more reports of subjective stress in high- as compared with low-specific participants. Also, afterward, high-specific participants rated their unprompted memories for the event as more unpleasant. The results indicate that, relative to high specificity, being less specific in the retrieval of AMs is associated with less affective impact of a negative event. Results are discussed within the affect-regulation model. It is suggested that future research take a more functional perspective on AM specificity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Tobacco withdrawal and negative affect: An analysis of initial emotional response intensity and voluntary emotion regulation.

This report used emotion-modulated startle to refine theoretically critical claims about negative affect during tobacco withdrawal. Forty-eight dependent smokers (assigned to either a 24-hr nicotine withdrawal condition or a continued smoking condition) and 48 nonsmokers participated in this study. Participants viewed a series of neutral and unpleasant photographic images and were instructed to enhance, suppress, or maintain their emotional response during specific trials. Participants' startle response was measured before and after this regulation instruction to index 2 components of emotional response: initial negative emotional response intensity and emotion regulation. Compared with the nonwithdrawn groups (continuing smokers and nonsmokers), withdrawal significantly increased self-reported negative affect. However, startle response indicated that emotional response intensity and emotion regulation success were not affected by withdrawal. These results are important because they constrain interpretation of the predominantly self-report literature on the affective consequences of tobacco withdrawal. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Clearing the mind: A working memory model of distraction from negative mood.

The present research examined whether and how loading working memory can attenuate negative mood. In three experiments, participants were exposed to neutral, weakly negative, or strongly negative pictures followed by a task and a mood scale. Working memory demands were varied by manipulating task presence (Study 1), complexity (Study 2), and predictability (Study 3). Participants in all three experiments reported less negative moods in negative trials with high compared to low working memory demand. Working memory demands did not affect mood in the neutral trials. When working memory demands were high, participants no longer reported more negative moods in response to strongly negative pictures than to weakly negative pictures. These findings suggest that loading working memory prevents mood-congruent processing, and thereby promotes distraction from negative moods. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Metacognitive emotion regulation: Children's awareness that changing thoughts and goals can alleviate negative emotions.

Metacognitive emotion regulation strategies involve deliberately changing thoughts or goals to alleviate negative emotions. Adults commonly engage in this type of emotion regulation, but little is known about the developmental roots of this ability. Two studies were designed to assess whether 5- and 6-year-old children can generate such strategies and, if so, the types of metacognitive strategies they use. In Study 1, children described how story protagonists could alleviate negative emotions. In Study 2, children recalled times that they personally had felt sad, angry, and scared and described how they had regulated their emotions. In contrast to research suggesting that young children cannot use metacognitive regulation strategies, the majority of children in both studies described such strategies. Children were surprisingly sophisticated in their suggestions for how to cope with negative emotions and tailored their regulatory responses to specific emotional situations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Working memory capacity and spontaneous emotion regulation: High capacity predicts self-enhancement in response to negative feedback.

Although previous evidence suggests that working memory capacity (WMC) is important for success at emotion regulation, that evidence may reveal simply that people with higher WMC follow instructions better than those with lower WMC. The present study tested the hypothesis that people with higher WMC more effectively engage in spontaneous emotion regulation following negative feedback, relative to those with lower WMC. Participants were randomly assigned to receive either no feedback or negative feedback about their emotional intelligence. They then completed a disguised measure of self-enhancement and a self-report measure of affect. Experimental condition and WMC interacted such that higher WMC predicted more self-enhancement and less negative affect following negative feedback. This research provides novel insight into the consequences of individual differences in WMC and illustrates that cognitive capacity may facilitate the spontaneous self-regulation of emotion. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Aging, source memory, and emotion.

In 2 experiments we assessed younger and older adults' ability to remember contextual information about an event. Each experiment examined memory for 3 different types of contextual information: (a) perceptual information (e.g., location of an item); (b) conceptual, nonemotional information (e.g., quality of an item); and (c) conceptual, emotional information (e.g., safety of an item). Consistent with a large literature on aging and source memory, younger adults outperformed older adults when the contextual information was perceptual in nature and when it was conceptual, but not emotional. Age differences in source memory were eliminated, however, when participants recalled emotional source information. These findings suggest that emotional information differentially engages older adults, possibly evoking enhanced elaborations and associations. The data are also consistent with a growing literature, suggesting that emotional processing remains stable with age (e.g., Carstensen & Turk-Charles, 1994, 1998; Isaacowitz, Charles, & Carstensen, 2000). (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)     

A classification of controlled interpersonal affect regulation strategies.

Controlled interpersonal affect regulation refers to the deliberate regulation of someone else’s affect. Building on existing research concerning this everyday process, the authors describe the development of a theoretical classification scheme that distinguishes between the types of strategy used to achieve interpersonal affect regulation. To test the theoretical classification, the authors generated a corpus of 378 distinct strategies using self-report questionnaires and diaries completed by student and working samples. Twenty participants then performed a card-sort of the strategies. Hierarchical cluster analysis was used to determine how well the theoretical classification represented spontaneous understandings of controlled interpersonal affect regulation. The final classification primarily distinguished between strategies used to improve versus those used to worsen others’ affect, and between strategies that engaged the target in a situation or affective state versus relationship-oriented strategies. The classification provides a meaningful basis for organizing existing research and making future conceptual and empirical distinctions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Culture, emotion regulation, and adjustment.

This article reports differences across 23 countries on 2 processes of emotion regulation--reappraisal and suppression. Cultural dimensions were correlated with country means on both and the relationship between them. Cultures that emphasized the maintenance of social order--that is, those that were long-term oriented and valued embeddedness and hierarchy--tended to have higher scores on suppression, and reappraisal and suppression tended to be positively correlated. In contrast, cultures that minimized the maintenance of social order and valued individual Affective Autonomy and Egalitarianism tended to have lower scores on Suppression, and Reappraisal and Suppression tended to be negatively correlated. Moreover, country-level emotion regulation was significantly correlated with country-level indices of both positive and negative adjustment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Emotion regulation in interpersonal problems: The role of cognitive-emotional complexity, emotion regulation goals, and expressivity.

Young, middle-aged, and older adults' emotion regulation strategies in interpersonal problems were examined. Participants imagined themselves in anger- or sadness-eliciting situations with a close friend. Factor analyses of a new questionnaire supported a 4-factor model of emotion regulation strategies, including passivity, expressing emotions, seeking emotional information or support, and solving the problem. Results suggest that age differences in emotion regulation (such as older adults' increased endorsement of passive emotion regulation relative to young adults) are partially due to older adults' decreased ability to integrate emotion and cognition, increased prioritization of emotion regulation goals, and decreased tendency to express anger. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Association between the serotonin transporter promoter polymorphism (5-HTTLPR) and adult unresolved attachment.

Research on antecedents of organized attachment has focused on the quality of caregiving received during childhood. In recent years, research has begun to examine the influence of genetic factors on quality of infant attachment. However, no published studies report on the association between specific genetic factors and adult attachment. This study examined the link between the 5-HTTLPR promoter polymorphism of the serotonin transporter gene and adult unresolved attachment assessed with the Adult Attachment Interview. Genetic material and information on attachment-related loss or trauma were available for 86 participants. Multivariate regression analyses showed an association between the short 5-HTTLPR allele and increased risk for unresolved attachment. Temperament traits and psychological symptoms did not affect the association between 5-HTTLPR and unresolved attachment. The authors hypothesize that the increased susceptibility to unresolved attachment among carriers of the short allele of 5-HTTLPR is consistent with the role of serotonin in modulation of frontal-amygdala circuitry. The findings challenge current thinking by demonstrating significant genetic influences on a phenomenon previously thought to be largely environmentally driven. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Alexithymia, memory of emotion, emotional awareness, and perfectionism.

The Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20; R. M. Bagby, J. D. A. Parker, & G. J. Taylor, 1994) is a self-assessment instrument designed to measure deficits in metaemotional functioning (e.g., difficulties in identifying and describing emotions). Four studies were carried out to examine the association between the TAS-20 and (a) performance measures of meta-emotional functioning (memory of emotion and emotional awareness; Studies 1-2) and (b) measures of perfectionistic standards that may possibly be involved in the self-assessment of abilities--difficulties (Studies 3-4). The TAS-20 failed to correlate in the predicted direction with the performance measures but showed sizable correlations with measures of perfectionism. Moreover, perfectionism was found to predict TAS-20 scores independent of depression, anxiety, and somatic complaints. The results are discussed in terms of the TAS-20 measuring primarily certain aspects of meta-emotional self-efficacy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Predictors of caregiving in adult intimate relationships: An attachment theoretical perspective.

Romantic couples (N?=?194) participated in an investigation of caregiving processes in adulthood. In Phase 1, couple members completed questionnaires designed to identify attachment style differences in caregiving behavior and to explore the underlying (personal and relationship) mechanisms that lead people with different attachment styles to be effective or ineffective caregivers. Results revealed that social support knowledge, prosocial orientation, interdependence, trust, and egoistic motivation mediated the link between attachment style and caregiving. In Phase 2, responsive caregiving was assessed behaviorally by exposing one member of the couple to a stressful laboratory situation and experimentally manipulating his or her need for support. Results revealed that attachment style and mediating mechanisms identified in Phase 1 also predicted observable support behavior in a specific episode in which a partner had a clear need for support. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Unintended influences of perception and memory: Attention, awareness, and control.

There has been a great deal of recent interest in the finding of dissociations between performance on implicit or indirect and explicit or direct tests of memory. Implicit tests are said to primarily reflect automatic or unconscious uses of memory, whereas explicit tests primarily reflect strategic or consciously-controlled uses of memory. Rather than identify different processes with different tasks, as is done by use of the implicit/explicit distinction, we have developed a method for separating the within-task contributions of unconscious and consciously-controlled influences. Our general approach starts with the assumption that unconscious or automatic influences and consciously-controlled influences make independent contributions to performance. Several experiments were reported to show the utility of the process-dissociation procedures. Among the findings of those experiments is that conditions traditionally associated with automaticity do have differential effects on consciously-controlled and unconscious (automatic) influences, as measured by the process-dissociation procedure. Other experiments were used to illustrate potential advantages of the process-dissociation procedure over reliance on implicit tests as a means of investigating unconscious influences. Still other experiments were briefly described to show that the process-dissociation procedure can be extended to separate the contributions of consciously-controlled and unconscious influences in a wide variety of domains. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)