The present study explored the role of snapshot emotional priming and math anxiety in estimation strategy selection. Participants were asked to complete a two-digit multiplication estimation task (e.g., 34 × 67) under explicit (Experiment 1) and implicit (Experiment 2) snapshot emotional priming conditions by freely choosing to use DU (down-up, e.g., doing 30 × 70 = 2100 for 34 × 67) or UD (up-down, e.g., doing 40 × 60 = 2400 for 34 × 67) strategies to arrive as close as possible to the correct answer. In Experiment 1, individuals’ estimation performance was positively influenced by explicit happy priming (shorter RT (reaction time)), while not affected by explicit fear priming. In Experiment 2, individuals’ estimation ACC (accuracy) when using the UD strategy was negatively affected by both implicit happy and fear priming, but their RT when using DU and UD strategies was positively impacted by implicit happy priming. In both experiments, the correlations between math anxiety and estimation performance (ACC, RT, and strategy selection adaptivity) was not significant. The present study suggests that fear priming was not always detrimental to individuals’ estimation performance, and happy priming did not always universally improve individuals’ estimation performance. Additionally, estimation strategy selection was not influenced by math anxiety.

A large number of studies have studied the influence of emotional experience on an individual’s estimation performance, but the influence of implicit emotion regulation is still unknown. Participants were asked to complete the following tasks in order: idiom matching task, multiplication computational estimation task (MCE task), gender judgment task (GJ task), and emotional experience intensity assessment task. The words matching task was adopted to achieve the purpose of implicit emotion regulation (implicit reappraisal and implicit suppression). Behavioral results showed that implicit reappraisal and implicit suppression equally contributed to improving an individual’s estimation speed (but not ACC (accuracy)). The MCE task related ERP (event-related potential) results showed that the influence of implicit emotion regulation on estimation consisted of two phases. In the first phase (encoding phase), implicit reappraisal both enhanced (larger P1 amplitudes) and weakened (smaller N170 amplitudes) an individual’s encoding sensitivity, while implicit suppression enhanced an individual’s encoding sensitivity (larger P1 amplitudes). In the second phase (estimation strategies retrieval phase), implicit reappraisal (but not implicit suppression) cost more attention resources (larger LPC2 and LPC3 amplitudes). The present study suggested that both implicit reappraisal and implicit suppression contributed to improving an individual’s estimation performance, and the regulation effect of implicit suppression (vs. implicit reappraisal) was better.