Deconstructing Reappraisal: Descriptions Preceding Arousing Pictures Modulate the Subsequent Neural Response

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...

Positively reinterpreting negative experiences is important for psychological well-being and represents a key mechanism of cognitive-behavioral therapies for emotional problems. Yet, little is known about the neural mechanisms that underlie this process and how they relate to clinically relevant individual differences. Here we demonstrate using event-related potentials (ERPs) that positively reappraising distress-inducing images is associated with early increases in frontal control activity and later decreases in parietal arousal-related activity. Moreover, we show that people's chronic tendencies to reappraise versus worry modulate neural activity in opposing directions-trait reappraisal predicts decreases in parietal arousal-related activity during positive reappraisal implementation whereas worry predicts increases in the same waveform. These findings provide novel insights into the neural time course of positive reappraisal. They also speak to the potential clinical utility of neurophysiological measures as relatively inexpensive, noninvasive biomarkers that could serve as risk indicators and treatment mediators.

The aim of the present study was to uncover the temporal dynamics of face recognition as a function of reward. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded during the encoding and the subsequent old/new memory test in response to faces that could be associated with a monetary reward. The behavioral results showed that faces associated with reward at both encoding and retrieval were recognized better than the unrewarded ones. ERP responses highlighted that successful encoding predictive of subsequent memory was greater for faces associated with reward than for faces without reward-driven motivational learning. At retrieval, an early positive-going component was elicited for potentially rewarded faces on frontal regions, while the occipito-temporal N170 component showed priming effects as a function of reward. Later on, larger centro-parietal ERP components, related to recognition memory, were found selectively for reward-associated faces. Remarkably, electrophysiological responses varied in a graded manner, with the largest amplitude yielded by faces with double reward, followed by faces associated with reward only at encoding. Taken together, the present data show that the processing of outcome expectations affects face structural encoding and increases memory efficiency, yielding a robust and sustained modulation over frontal and temporal areas where reward and memory mechanisms operate in conjunction.