Suppression and enhancement of emotional responses to unpleasant pictures

Abstract

Despite the prominence of emotional dysfunction in psychopathology, relatively few experiments have explicitly studied emotion regulation in adults. The present study examined one type of emotion regulation: voluntary regulation of short-term emotional responses to unpleasant visual stimuli. In a sample of 48 college students, both eyeblink startle magnitude and corrugator activity were sensitive to experimental manipulation. Instructions to suppress negative emotion led to both smaller startle eyeblinks and decreased corrugator activity. Instructions to enhance negative emotion led to larger startle eyeblinks and increased corrugator activity. Several advantages of this experimental manipulation are discussed, including the use of both a suppress and an enhance emotion condition, independent measurement of initial emotion elicitation and subsequent regulation of that emotion, the use of a completely within-subjects design, and the use of naturalistic emotion regulation strategies.

Startle modulation during conscious emotion regulation is arousal-dependent.

“…However, when analyses were conducted on negative and positive trials separately, the differences on maintain and suppress trials were not statistically reliable. This result stands in contrast to Jackson et al (2000), who reported reliable differences on maintain versus suppress trials using negative pictures. The reason for this difference is unclear, although it may be due to statistical power.…”

“…Jackson, Malmstadt, Larson, and Davidson (2000) demonstrated that cognitive change can affect eyeblink startle. In that study, participants viewed emotionally negative and neutral pictures.…”

“…Emotion regulation researchers have addressed this issue in two ways. First, by examining multiple regulation strategies in one experiment, researchers have attempted to control for nonspecific effort associated with attempts at emotional control (Jackson et al, 2000;Ochsner et al, 2004). Second, attempts to enhance or decrease emotional responses have been contrasted with attempts to maintain or attend to emotional responses (Jackson et al, 2000;Ochsner, Bunge, Gross, & Gabrieli, 2002).…”

Effects of emotion regulation strategy on brain responses to the valence and social content of visual scenes

“…These activation patterns may reflect common influences of the two ER strategies on attention and perception, changes in affective processes underlying arousal and pain-related representations, as well as higher cognitive effects related to mentalizing about self and others. More generally, we surmise that the more widespread effects of REAP relative to ESUP may reflect the more efficient and greater benefits of the former over the latter strategy (Gross, 2002;Jackson et al, 2000).…”

“…However, besides being influenced by emotions in our actions, we in turn have the ability to modulate our emotional responses by different mechanisms. The importance of emotion regulation (ER) capacities can be observed in various domains or situations, either in terms of increasing pos-itive health outcomes when used appropriately, or by promoting mood disorders and anxiety when malfunctioning (Gross, 2002;Jackson, Malmstadt, Larson, & Davidson, 2000). Uncovering the neural mechanisms that can regulate affect and their influence on the processing of emotionally significant information is therefore of great importance, not only to gain insight into the determinants of well-being and adaptive emotional processing, but also to better understand the predispositions to affective disorders and the effect of specific therapeutic interventions.…”