Effects of Menstrual Cycle and Neuroticism on Emotional Responses of Healthy Women

Effects of menstrual cycle and neuroticism on females' emotion regulation

“…The current study investigated the down-regulation of sadness; therefore, GSR was selected to reflect the effect of emotion regulation. Additionally, consistent with Wu et al (2014), the results of self-reported sadness showed that the menstrual cycle did not affect subjective experiences of sadness. Ossewaarde et al (2010) used both physiological measures and self-reports to index participants' emotional responses across the menstrual cycle, and the results showed that the influence of the menstrual cycle on emotional response could only be found on physiological measures rather than self-reports.…”

“…Similarly, we used sad film clips as stimuli, and the mean amplitude of galvanic skin response (GSR) and heart rate (HR) were used as physiological arousal indices in the current study. GSR and HR were sensitive to sadness arousal (Kreibig et al, 2007;Kreibig, 2010;Troy et al, 2010;Wu et al, 2014), and they could be regulated by reappraisal, according to previous studies (Giuliani et al, 2008;Yuan et al, 2011).…”

“…Experimental studies have observed reappraisal to be an effective strategy for decreasing negative emotional experience, physiological arousal and behavioral expression (for a review, see Gross, 2002). According to our previous findings, highly neurotic women's physiological responses (i.e., galvanic skin response, heart rate) are more likely to be affected by their menstrual cycle than those of women low in neuroticism when watching sad film clips (Wu et al, 2014). Similarly, we used sad film clips as stimuli, and the mean amplitude of galvanic skin response (GSR) and heart rate (HR) were used as physiological arousal indices in the current study.…”

“…Previous studies have suggested that autonomic nervous activity of healthy young women fluctuated during the menstrual cycle, both in their resting state (Usha Rani et al, 2013) and in their sad film clip watching state (Wu et al, 2014), which means that change scores that reflect the regulation effects on self-reported sadness may not be able to eliminate the baseline (no reappraisal condition) differences between the different phases of the menstrual cycle. In this regard, we used a ratio that took into account the no reappraisal condition of responding to index the reappraisal success at decreasing physiological arousal.…”

“…Women's unique traits may play a role in determining their emotional responding during a menstrual cycle. For example, researchers have found that subjective experience and physiological responses towards negative emotion during a menstrual cycle are more influential for neurotic women than they are for women who are low in neuroticism (Wu et al, 2014). Furthermore, it has been observed that women who are high in neuroticism report having more premenstrual symptoms than women who are low in neuroticism do (Treloar et al, 2002;Van Den Akker et al, 1995).…”