Although much research considers how individuals manage their own emotions, less is known about the emotional benefits of regulating the emotions of others. We examined this topic in a 3-week study of an online platform providing training and practice in the social regulation of emotion. We found that participants who engaged more by helping others (vs. sharing and receiving support for their own problems) showed greater decreases in depression, mediated by increased use of reappraisal in daily life. Moreover, social regulation messages with more other-focused language (i.e., second-person pronouns) were (a) more likely to elicit expressions of gratitude from recipients and (b) predictive of increased use of reappraisal over time for message composers, suggesting perspective-taking enhances the benefits of practicing social regulation. These findings unpack potential mechanisms of socially oriented training in emotion regulation and suggest that by helping others regulate, we may enhance our own regulatory skills and emotional well-being.

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Neuroimaging research has identified systems that facilitate minimizing negative emotion, but how the brain is able to transform the valence of an emotional response from negative to positive is unclear. Behavioral and psychophysiological studies suggest a distinction between minimizing reappraisal, which entails diminishing the arousal elicited by negative stimuli, and positive reappraisal, which instead changes the emotional valence of arousal from negative to positive. Here we show that successful minimizing reappraisal tracked with decreased activity in the amygdala, but successful positive reappraisal tracked with increased activity in regions involved in computing reward value, including the ventral striatum and ventromedial pFC (vmPFC). Moreover, positive reappraisal enhanced positive connectivity between vmPFC and amygdala, and individual differences in positive connectivity between vmPFC and amygdala, ventral striatum, dorsomedial pFC, and dorsolateral pFC predicted greater positive reappraisal success. These data broaden models of emotion regulation as quantitative dampening of negative emotion and identify activity in a network of brain valuation, arousal, and control regions as a neural basis for the ability to create positive meaning from negative experiences.

Introduction Previous research has identified specific brain regions associated with regulating emotion using common strategies such as expressive suppression and cognitive reappraisal. However, most research focuses on a priori regions and directs participants how to regulate, which may not reflect how people naturally regulate outside the laboratory. Method Here, we used a data‐driven approach to investigate how individual differences in distributed intrinsic functional brain connectivity predict emotion regulation tendency outside the laboratory. Specifically, we used connectome‐based predictive modeling to extract functional connections in the brain significantly related to the dispositional use of suppression and reappraisal. These edges were then used in a predictive model and cross‐validated in novel participants to identify a neural signature that reflects individual differences in the tendency to suppress and reappraise emotion. Results We found a significant neural signature for the dispositional use of suppression, but not reappraisal. Within this whole‐brain signature, the intrinsic connectivity of the default mode network was most informative of suppression tendency. In addition, the predictive performance of this model was significant in males, but not females. Conclusion These findings help inform how whole‐brain networks of functional connectivity characterize how people tend to regulate emotion outside the laboratory.

The events we experience day to day can be described in terms of their affective quality: some are rewarding, others are upsetting, and still others are inconsequential. These natural distinctions reflect an underlying representational structure used to classify affective quality. In affective psychology, many experiments model this representational structure with two dimensions, using either the dimensions of valence and arousal, or alternatively, the dimensions of positivity and negativity. Using fMRI, we show that it is optimal to use all four dimensions to examine the data. Our findings include (1) a gradient representation of valence that is anatomically organized along the fusiform gyrus and (2) distinct sub-regions within bilateral amygdala that track arousal versus negativity. Importantly, these results would have remained concealed had either of the commonly used 2-dimensional approaches been adopted a priori, demonstrating the utility of our approach.

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Anxiety influences how individuals experience and regulate emotions in a variety of ways. For example, individuals with lower anxiety tend to cognitively reframe (reappraise) negative emotion and those with higher anxiety tend to suppress negative emotion. Research has also investigated these individual differences with psychophysiology. These lines of research assume coherence between how individuals regulate outside the laboratory, typically measured with self-report, and how they regulate during an experiment. Indeed, performance during experiments is interpreted as an indication of future behavior outside the laboratory, yet this relationship is seldom directly explored. To address this gap, we computed psychophysiological profiles of uninstructed (natural) regulation in the laboratory and explored the coherence between these profiles and a) self-reported anxiety and b) self-reported regulation tendency. Participants viewed negative images and were instructed to reappraise, suppress or naturally engage. Electrodermal and facial electromyography signals were recorded to compute a multivariate psychophysiological profile of regulation. Participants with lower anxiety exhibited similar profiles when naturally regulating and following instructions to reappraise, suggesting they naturally reappraised more. Participants with higher anxiety exhibited similar profiles when naturally regulating and following instructions to suppress, suggesting they naturally suppressed more. However, there was no association between self-reported reappraisal or suppression tendency and psychophysiology. These exploratory results indicate that anxiety, but not regulation tendency, predicts how individuals regulate emotion in the laboratory. These findings suggest that how individuals report regulating in the real world does not map on to how they regulate in the laboratory. Taken together, this underscores the importance of developing emotion-regulation interventions and paradigms that more closely align to and predict real-world outcomes.

Although backward masking is a powerful experimental tool in mitigating visual awareness of facial expressions of emotion, ~20% of participants consistently report being resistant to its effects. In our previous studies, we excluded these participants from analysis as we focused on neural data in individuals who were subjectively unaware of backward-masked facial features that were presented for a brief period of time (e.g., 17ms). Here, we shifted our focus to potential structural brain difference between aware and unaware participants. To achieve this, structural magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI) data were pooled from two recent backward masking studies of emotional faces or eye whites (Kim et al., 2016, 2010). Out of a total of 64 participants, 12 reported being subjectively aware of the masked faces or their facial features. Whole-brain, voxel-based morphometric analysis of structural MRI data yielded significantly greater volume of the posterior thalamus, including the bilateral pulvinar, for the subjectively aware versus unaware individuals. No other brain region showed significant volumetric differences between groups. The present findings offer a neuroanatomical basis for visual awareness of emotional content in the form of backward-masked facial features, which complements the known functional role of the pulvinar in such neurobehavioral processes.