These results provide evidence for exaggerated amygdala responsivity, diminished medial prefrontal cortex responsivity, and a reciprocal relationship between these 2 regions during passive viewing of overtly presented affective stimuli unrelated to trauma in PTSD.

a b s t r a c tIn emotion regulation (ER) research, participants are often trained to use specific strategies in response to emotionally evocative stimuli. Yet theoretical models suggest that people vary significantly in strategy use in everyday life. Which specific strategies people choose to use, and how many, may partially depend on contextual factors like the emotional intensity of the situation. It is thus possible -even likely -that participants spontaneously use uninstructed ER strategies in the laboratory, and that these uninstructed choices may depend on contextual factors like emotional intensity. We report data from four studies in which participants were instructed to use cognitive reappraisal to regulate their emotions in response to pictures, the emotional intensity of which varied across studies. After the picture trials, participants described which and how many strategies they used by way of open-ended responses. Results indicated that while a substantial proportion of participants in all studies described strategies consistent with cognitive reappraisal, a substantial proportion also endorsed uninstructed strategies. Importantly, they did so more often in the context of studies in which they viewed higher-intensity pictures. These findings underscore the importance of considering uninstructed ER choice in instructed paradigms and situational context in all studies of ER.

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Frequent and successful use of cognitive reappraisal, an emotion regulation strategy that involves rethinking the meaning of an emotional event in order to change one's emotional response, has been linked in everyday life to positive outcomes such as higher well-being. Whether we should expect this association to be maintained in a strong, temporally and spatially close emotional context is an unexplored question that might have important implications for our understanding of emotion regulation and its relations to psychological functioning. In this study of members of the U. S. Embassy Tokyo community in the months following the March 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear crisis in Japan, self-reported use of cognitive reappraisal was not related to psychological functioning, but demonstrated success using cognitive reappraisal to decrease feelings of unpleasantness in response to disaster-related pictures on a performance-based task was associated with fewer symptoms of depression and posttraumatic stress. Moreover, emotional reactivity to these pictures was associated with greater symptomatology. These results suggest that situational intensity may be an important moderator of reappraisal and psychological functioning relationships.

Previous research has suggested that biased attention toward emotional (typically threatening) stimuli contributes to ill-being (e.g., high levels of anxiety), but its contribution to well-being is less clear. The researchers assessed naturalistic shifts in attentional bias toward threatening and pleasant schematic face cues in response to five induced mood states in college students. They also assessed state anxiety and satisfaction with life concurrently and 3 weeks later. Controlling for concurrent anxiety, a fear-induced shift in attention to threatening cues was associated with increased levels of later anxiety. Controlling for concurrent life satisfaction, a happiness-induced shift in attention to emotional cues (both threatening and pleasant) was associated with increased levels of later life satisfaction. These results suggest that mood-induced changes in deployment of attention to emotional information may accumulate in ways that impact psychological functioning, yet these effects depend on mood state and the emotional cues afforded by the context.