Reappraisal modulates the electrocortical response to unpleasant pictures

Alexithymia is a personality trait associated with the reduced ability to regulate, identify, and communicate feelings or emotions and is often linked to psychosomatic disorders. The present study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate the relationship between individual differences in alexithymia and emotion regulation. Participants classified as scoring either high or low on the revised form of the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20; Taylor, Bagby, & Parker Psychother Psychosom 57:34-41, 1992) were asked to view negative and neutral images, adopting three different regulation strategies (expressive suppression, cognitive reappraisal, and attend) while ERPs were recorded. Results revealed an inverse relationship between TAS scores and emotion-related ERP activity during suppression, but not during reappraisal or a control "attend" condition. These results were observed in both early and late ERP latencies. These findings are interpreted according to potential differences between high-and low-TAS individuals regarding the frequency of prior utilization of suppression-based regulation strategies.

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...

Literature has shown that failures in the ability to down-regulate negative emotions are the core substrate of anxiety disorders. Previous studies have investigated this issue by encouraging individuals to voluntarily change how they think about a situation in order to decrease its emotional impact. The majority of studies has demonstrated that explicit instructions to reduce negative affect in anxious individuals are usually ineffective. Thus, the goal of the present study was to investigate whether an implicit regulation strategy would modulate electrophysiological activity (Late Positive Potential) associated to affective picture viewing. The Late Positive Potential (LPP) is a sustained positive deflection in the event-related potential that is larger following the presentation of emotional compared to neutral visual stimuli. Participants (low trait anxious -LTA and high trait anxious -HTA individuals) performed an attention task (bar orientation discrimination) while emotional distractive pictures were presented. The task was performed in two different contexts: in the Real context, participants were informed that the distractive pictures had been obtained from real life situations, whereas in the Fictitious context they were told that the pictures had been obtained from movie scenes. In this vein, we encouraged participants to change how they appraised the pictures. Results showed that HTA individuals exhibited larger Late Positive Potential (LPPs) when mutilation pictures were presented in the Real context. Importantly, during the Fictitious one (regulation strategy) the LPP was reduced even in HTA individuals, emphasizing its importance to psychotherapeutic interventions. The present results indicate that HTA individuals are susceptible to modifications in affective contexts.