Neural correlates of immediate and prolonged effects of cognitive reappraisal and distraction on emotional experience

When confronted with unwanted negative emotions, individuals use a variety of cognitive strategies for regulating these emotions. The brain mechanisms underlying these emotion regulation strategies have not been fully characterized, and it is not yet clear whether these mechanisms vary as a function of emotion intensity. To address these issues, 30 community participants (17 females, 13 males, M age = 24.3 years) completed a picture-viewing emotion regulation task with neutral viewing, reacting to negative stimuli, cognitive reappraisal, attentional deployment, and self-distancing conditions. Brain and behavioral data were simultaneously collected in a 3T GE MRI scanner. Findings indicated that prefrontal regions were engaged by all three regulation strategies, but reappraisal showed the least amount of increase in activity as a function of intensity. Overall, these results suggest that there are both brain and behavioral effects of intensity and that intensity is useful for probing strategy-specific effects and the relationships between the strategies. Furthermore, while these three strategies showed significant overlap, there also were specific strategy-intensity interactions, such as frontoparietal control regions being preferentially activated by reappraisal and self-distancing. Conversely, self-referential and attentional regions were preferentially recruited by self-distancing and distraction as intensity increased. Overall, these findings are consistent with the notion that there is a continuum of cognitive emotion regulation along which all three of these strategies lie.

Savoring is an emotion regulation technique that aims to increase, sustain, and deepen positive emotion. It has been incorporated into several novel, “positive affect” interventions for anxiety, depression, and chronic pain, but has not been studied in a laboratory setting. As such, it is unknown whether savoring can modulate subjective and neural correlates of emotion‐processing and whether savoring might exert a persistent effect on stimulus processing (i.e., modulating response at subsequent encounter). Here, 49 participants savored or viewed positive and neutral pictures, before seeing the same pictures again approximately 20 min later without instructions to savor (or view) pictures. Subjective valence and arousal ratings and the picture‐elicited late positive potential (LPP) were assessed during both tasks. Results showed that savoring increased participant ratings of picture pleasantness and arousal as well as a picture‐elicited LPP. Moreover, pictures that had previously been savored continued to elicit higher ratings during the subsequent picture viewing task. A larger LPP was observed for previously savored positive and neutral pictures during an early portion of picture viewing; later on during picture viewing, this effect was limited to positive pictures only (i.e., it was not evident for neutral pictures). Results validate savoring as an effective and durable means of increasing positive emotion and are discussed in the context of a broader emotion regulation literature, which has primarily examined the downregulation of negative picture processing.

Introduction:Cognitive reappraisal, an important strategy of emotion regulation, can change emotional experience and attention to emotional information. However, not all individuals can deploy reappraisal strategies successfully. In the current study, we investigated event-related potential (ERP) characteristics of reappraisal success and of reappraisal failure.Methods: Twenty-six participants were divided into the success group or the failure group based on self-report ratings of how successful they were in reducing their response to negative images using cognitive reappraisal strategy. All participants viewed 30 neutral images and 30 negative images which they were asked to just watch, and 30 negative stimuli that they were asked to reappraise, while electroencephalogram (EEG) was recorded.