Research on emotion regulation has focused upon observers' ability to regulate their emotional reaction to stimuli such as affective pictures, but many other aspects of our affective experience are also potentially amenable to intentional cognitive regulation. In the domain of decision-making, recent work has demonstrated a role for emotions in choice, although such work has generally remained agnostic about the specific role of emotion. Combining psychologically-derived cognitive strategies, physiological measurements of arousal, and an economic model of behavior, this study examined changes in choices (specifically, loss aversion) and physiological correlates of behavior as the result of an intentional cognitive regulation strategy. Participants were on average more aroused per dollar to losses relative to gains, as measured with skin conductance response, and the difference in arousal to losses versus gains correlated with behavioral loss aversion across subjects. These results suggest a specific role for arousal responses in loss aversion. Most importantly, the intentional cognitive regulation strategy, which emphasized ''perspective-taking,'' uniquely reduced both behavioral loss aversion and arousal to losses relative to gains, largely by influencing arousal to losses. Our results confirm previous research demonstrating loss aversion while providing new evidence characterizing individual differences and arousal correlates and illustrating the effectiveness of intentional regulation strategies in reducing loss aversion both behaviorally and physiologically.arousal ͉ emotion regulation ͉ decision-making W e are not at the whim of our emotions-rather, research on emotion regulation suggests we have a degree of control over our affective state and can reduce or enhance the emotional impact of a given stimulus in real time (1). We are able to do this intentionally, and when doing so, we not only report decreased negative affect (1-3) but also show signs of decreased physiological responding (4, 5) and decreased activity in brain areas that are closely linked to emotions and affect (1-3). Emotion regulation research so far has primarily used pictures (1-5), but any stimulus that results in an emotional response could theoretically be the target of regulation. We propose to examine a specific role for emotions in economic choice behavior and to observe the effects of an intentional cognitive regulation strategy on both behavior and associated emotional responses.It is widely acknowledged that emotion plays a role in decisionmaking, drawing on evidence from numerous behavioral studies using emotional stimuli as well as physiological, neuroimaging, and lesion studies. For example, one study demonstrated that irrelevant emotional states induced by film clips could eliminate or even reverse the endowment effect (higher selling than buying prices) in subsequent choices (6). Another study on consumption behavior of drinks showed that the subliminal presentation of emotional faces not only altered participants' ratings ...

Fear responses can be eliminated through extinction, a procedure involving the presentation of fear-eliciting stimuli without aversive outcomes. Extinction is believed to be mediated by new inhibitory learning that acts to suppress fear expression without erasing the original memory trace. This hypothesis is supported mainly by behavioral data demonstrating that fear can recover following extinction. However, a recent report by Myers and coworkers suggests that extinction conducted immediately after fear learning may erase or prevent the consolidation of the fear memory trace. Since extinction is a major component of nearly all behavioral therapies for human fear disorders, this finding supports the notion that therapeutic intervention beginning very soon after a traumatic event will be more efficacious. Given the importance of this issue, and the controversy regarding immediate versus delayed therapeutic interventions, we examined two fear recovery phenomena in both rats and humans: spontaneous recovery (SR) and reinstatement. We found evidence for SR and reinstatement in both rats and humans even when extinction was conducted immediately after fear learning. Thus, our data do not support the hypothesis that immediate extinction erases the original memory trace, nor do they suggest that a close temporal proximity of therapeutic intervention to the traumatic event might be advantageous. . In a typical experiment, a neutral conditional stimulus (CS), such as a tone or image, is paired in time with an aversive unconditional stimulus (US), often an electrical shock. After conditioning, the CS elicits a fear state consisting of behavioral, autonomic, and endocrine responses.After conditioning, fear of the CS can be reduced or eliminated with an extinction procedure consisting of repeated presentations of the CS without the aversive US. Extinction is believed to induce new inhibitory learning that suppresses fear expression but leaves the original CS-US memory trace intact (for review, see Myers and Davis 2002). Evidence for this comes mainly from behavioral studies demonstrating that CS-elicited fear can return after extinction, an impossibility if extinction caused erasure of the original association. The most commonly cited behavioral phenomena supporting this inhibitory learning hypothesis are spontaneous recovery (SR), reinstatement, and renewal. In SR, CS fear re-emerges after extinction with the passage of time (Pavlov 1927;Baum 1988;Rescorla 2004). In reinstatement, unsignaled exposure to the US after extinction leads to context-dependent return of CS fear (Rescorla and Heth 1975;Bouton and Bolles 1979a;Westbrook et al. 2002). In renewal, CS fear returns when the CS is presented outside of the extinction context (Bouton and Bolles 1979b;Bouton and King 1983).Despite this evidence for fear recovery, some reports suggest that extinction may induce partial or complete erasure of the CS-US memory trace. Molecular and physiological studies indicate that extinction may depend on phosphatase activity that reverses n...