Regulatory effect of implicit acceptance during outcome evaluation: The temporal dynamics in an event-related potential study

Unconscious and conscious acceptance downregulate aggressive behavior: Mediating role of anger regulation

Social exclusion can induce negative emotions and aggression. While previous studies have investigated the effect of trait acceptance on emotional experience and aggression during social exclusion, it is still unclear how different forms of acceptance strategy can downregulate negative emotions and whether this potential reduction of negative emotions should mediate the effect of acceptance on aggression. To address these questions, 100 participants were recruited and randomly divided into three groups: control group (CG, N = 33), conscious acceptance group (CAG, N = 33) and unconscious acceptance group (UAG, N = 34). Negative emotions were induced by the cyberball game and measured by the modified PANAS. Aggressive behavior was assessed by the hot sauce allocation task. Results showed that anger, rather than other negative emotions, mediated the effect of acceptance on aggressive behavior. Conscious and unconscious acceptance both effectively regulated anger, hurt feelings and aggressive behavior during social exclusion. Compared to conscious acceptance, unconscious acceptance was associated with less reduction of positive emotion and had a better effect on reducing sadness. These findings highlight the advantage of applying unconscious acceptance strategy to regulating social exclusion-induced emotions for the purpose of reducing aggressive behavior.

Implicit, But Not Explicit, Emotion Regulation Relieves Unpleasant Neural Responses Evoked by High-Intensity Negative Images

Evidence suggests that explicit reappraisal has limited regulatory effects on high-intensity emotions, mainly due to the depletion of cognitive resources occupied by the high-intensity emotional stimulus itself. The implicit form of reappraisal has proved to be resource-saving and therefore might be an ideal strategy to achieve the desired regulatory effect in high-intensity situations. In this study, we explored the regulatory effect of explicit and implicit reappraisal when participants encountered low- and high-intensity negative images. The subjective emotional rating indicated that both explicit and implicit reappraisal down-regulated negative experiences, irrespective of intensity. However, the amplitude of the parietal late positive potential (LPP; a neural index of experienced emotional intensity) showed that only implicit reappraisal had significant regulatory effects in the high-intensity context, though both explicit and implicit reappraisal successfully reduced the emotional neural responses elicited by low-intensity negative images. Meanwhile, implicit reappraisal led to a smaller frontal LPP amplitude (an index of cognitive cost) compared to explicit reappraisal, indicating that the implementation of implicit reappraisal consumes limited cognitive control resources. Furthermore, we found a prolonged effect of implicit emotion regulation introduced by training procedures. Taken together, these findings not only reveal that implicit reappraisal is suitable to relieve high-intensity negative experiences as well as neural responses, but also highlight the potential benefit of trained implicit regulation in clinical populations whose frontal control resources are limited.

The Emotion-Regulation Benefits of Implicit Reappraisal in Clinical Depression: Behavioral and Electrophysiological Evidence

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is characterized by emotion dysregulation. Whether implicit emotion regulation can compensate for this deficit remains unknown. In this study, we recruited 159 subjects who were healthy controls, had subclinical depression, or had MDD, and examined them under baseline, implicit, and explicit reappraisal conditions. Explicit reappraisal led to the most negative feelings and the largest parietal late positive potential (parietal LPP, an index of emotion intensity) in the MDD group compared to the other two groups; the group difference was absent under the other two conditions. MDD patients showed larger regulatory effects in the LPP during implicit than explicit reappraisal, whereas healthy controls showed a reversed pattern. Furthermore, the frontal P3, an index of voluntary cognitive control, showed larger amplitudes in explicit reappraisal compared to baseline in the healthy and subclinical groups, but not in the MDD group, while implicit reappraisal did not increase P3 across groups. These findings suggest that implicit reappraisal is beneficial for clinical depression.

Estimation Strategy Utilization Is Modulated by Implicit Emotion Regulation: Evidence from Behavioral and Event-Related Potentials Studies

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.