The timing dynamics of regulating negative emotion with expressive suppression and cognitive reappraisal were investigated in a Chinese sample. Event-Related Potentials were recorded while subjects were required to view, suppress emotion expression to, or reappraise emotional pictures. The results showed a similar reduction in self-reported negative emotion during both strategies. Additionally, expressive suppression elicited larger amplitudes than reappraisal in central-frontal P3 component (340-480 ms). More importantly, the Late Positive Potential (LPP) amplitudes were decreased in each 200 ms of the 800-1600 ms time intervals during suppression vs. viewing conditions. In contrast, LPP amplitudes were similar for reappraisal and viewing conditions in all the time windows, except for the decreased amplitudes during reappraisal in the 1400-1600 ms. The LPP (but not P3) amplitudes were positively related to negative mood ratings, whereas the amplitudes of P3, rather than LPP, predict self-reported expressive suppression. These results suggest that expressive suppression decreases emotion responding more rapidly than reappraisal, at the cost of greater cognitive resource involvements in Chinese individuals. Event-related potentials, expressive suppression, unpleasant emotion, cognitive reappraisal Citation:Yuan JJ, Long QS, Ding NX, Lou YX, Liu YY, Yang JM. Event-related potentials, expressive suppression, unpleasant emotion, cognitive reappraisal. Sci China Life Sci, 2015, 58: 480 -491, doi: 10.1007 The ability to regulate unpleasant emotion is important for human life in the changing environments [13]. According to the time points in which a strategy has its primary impact in the emotion-generative process, Gross and coworkers distinguished between antecedent-focused and responsefocused strategies [4,5]. The former refers to strategies such as cognitive reappraisal, which requires interpreting emotion stimuli in a detached, emotion-irrelevant manner to modify emotion responses before they are fully blown. Conversely, the latter involves strategies that modulate emotional responses through modifying emotion-expressive behaviors, at the late stage of emotion activity. A typical example of response-focused strategy is expressive suppression [5,6]. Many studies revealed that cognitive reappraisal is effective in decreasing self-reported unpleasant emotion states, emotion-expressive behaviors and in reducing neural activity in the limbic brain system including amygdala and nucleus accumbens [4,79]. In contrast, it was reported that expressive inhibition was ineffective in decreasing the subjective experience of negative emotions such as anxiety [2,4,1012], while significantly increased peripheral physiological responding and limbic system activation [4,6,13]. In the early studies by Gross and colleagues, subjects who were presented with negative stimuli (e.g. films, pictures) received reappraisal, suppression or attending instructions. The results showed that reappraisal resulted in less negative experience, less...

Males are known for more suppression of emotional displays than females. However, when the emotion regulation effect of expressive suppression is greater in males, and how this sex difference varies with emotion display-related personality (e.g., extraversion), are undetermined. Event-related potentials were recorded while male and female participants different in extraversion were required to attend to or suppress emotional expression to negative pictures. Sex and extraversion did not modulate self-reported emotional experience. However, late positive potential (LPP) amplitudes showed an extraversion-moderated sex difference in the 2000–3000 ms and the 3000–4000 ms time epochs. LPP amplitudes were decreased during suppression versus viewing conditions in ambivert males, while this effect was absent in ambivert females. However, the LPP amplitudes of extraverts were similar for suppression and viewing conditions, irrespective of sex and timing. Regardless of early, middle, or late time windows, LPP amplitudes were positively related to self-reported emotion. These results suggest a male advantage for using expressive suppression for emotion regulation in non-extraverted, ambivert individuals.

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Background: Major depressive disorder (MDD) is an affective disorder that is harmful to both physical and mental health. Abnormal self-knowledge, which refers to abnormal judgments about oneself, is a core symptom of depression. However, little research has summarized how and why patients with MDD differ from healthy individuals in terms of self-knowledge. Objective: To gain a better understanding of MDD, we reviewed previous studies that focused on the behavioral and neurological changes of self-knowledge in this illness. Main Findings: On the behavioral level, depressed individuals exhibited negative self-knowledge in an explicit way, while more heterogeneous patterns were reported in implicit results. On the neurological level, depressed individuals, as compared with non-depressed controls, showed abnormal self-referential processing in both early perception and higher cognitive processing phases during the Self-Referential Encoding Task. Furthermore, fMRI studies have reported aberrant activity in the medial prefrontal cortex area for negative self-related items in depression. These results revealed several behavioral features and brain mechanisms underlying abnormal self-knowledge in depression. Future Studies: The neural mechanism of implicit self-knowledge in MDD remains unclear. Future research should examine the importance of others' attitudes on the self-concept of individuals with MDD, and whether abnormal self-views may be modified through cognitive or pharmacological approaches. In addition, differences in abnormal self-knowledge due to genetic variation between depressed and non-depressed populations remain unconfirmed. Importantly, it remains unknown whether abnormal self-knowledge could be used as a specific marker to distinguish healthy individuals from those with MDD. Conclusion: This review extends our understanding of the relationship between self-knowledge and depression by indicating several abnormalities among individuals with MDD and those who are at risk for this illness.