Anxiety, not regulation tendency, predicts how individuals regulate in the laboratory: An exploratory comparison of self-report and psychophysiology

Abstract

Anxiety influences how individuals experience and regulate emotions in a variety of ways. For example, individuals with lower anxiety tend to cognitively reframe (reappraise) negative emotion and those with higher anxiety tend to suppress negative emotion. Research has also investigated these individual differences with psychophysiology. These lines of research assume coherence between how individuals regulate outside the laboratory, typically measured with self-report, and how they regulate during an experiment. Indeed, performance during experiments is interpreted as an indication of future behavior outside the laboratory, yet this relationship is seldom directly explored. To address this gap, we computed psychophysiological profiles of uninstructed (natural) regulation in the laboratory and explored the coherence between these profiles and a) self-reported anxiety and b) self-reported regulation tendency. Participants viewed negative images and were instructed to reappraise, suppress or naturally engage. Electrodermal and facial electromyography signals were recorded to compute a multivariate psychophysiological profile of regulation. Participants with lower anxiety exhibited similar profiles when naturally regulating and following instructions to reappraise, suggesting they naturally reappraised more. Participants with higher anxiety exhibited similar profiles when naturally regulating and following instructions to suppress, suggesting they naturally suppressed more. However, there was no association between self-reported reappraisal or suppression tendency and psychophysiology. These exploratory results indicate that anxiety, but not regulation tendency, predicts how individuals regulate emotion in the laboratory. These findings suggest that how individuals report regulating in the real world does not map on to how they regulate in the laboratory. Taken together, this underscores the importance of developing emotion-regulation interventions and paradigms that more closely align to and predict real-world outcomes.

The Association Between Emotion Regulation, Physiological Arousal, and Performance in Math Anxiety

“…These were categories of stimuli that were chosen to be similar to previous investigations of emotion regulation ( McRae et al, 2010 ), and these stimuli are discussed in the Supplementary Material . These picture stimuli are further analyzed and discussed in Burr et al (2021) .…”

Estimating individual subjective values of emotion regulation strategies

“…For example, studies have shown that reappraisal of negative emotion is associated with reduced activity of the corrugator supercilii (associated with anger, sadness, and fear) with d = − 0.32 5 . In addition, the levator labii superioris (associated with disgust) has also been associated with reduced activity during reappraisal 6 . Similar effects have been reported for suppression 6 , distancing 7 , and distraction 8 .…”

“…In addition, the levator labii superioris (associated with disgust) has also been associated with reduced activity during reappraisal 6 . Similar effects have been reported for suppression 6 , distancing 7 , and distraction 8 . Importantly, results on electromyographic measures seem to be more consistent compared to other autonomic measures, likely because they are specific to emotional valence and its changes.…”

Childhood maltreatment and emotion regulation in everyday life: an experience sampling study

“…Until now, the large majority of studies have relied on single retrospective assessments of the habitual use of emotion regulation (i.e., global, trait-like assessments of the strategies that are typically used), which, on the one hand, are susceptible to recall limitations and generalization biases, and, on the other, fail to account for within-individual variability. People draw on different knowledge when reporting global (e.g., how you think you are in general) versus momentary (e.g., how you think you are at present) characteristics of emotion 14 , and there is evidence that reports of the habitual use of emotion regulation strategies have low ecological and discriminant validity in relation to the spontaneous use of those strategies in daily life 15 – 17 . For example, self-reported habitual reappraisal predicts not only reappraisal use in daily life, but also rumination and suppression use 16 .…”