Facial expression primes and implicit regulation of negative emotion

Abstract

An individual's responses to emotional information are influenced not only by the emotional quality of the information, but also by the context in which the information is presented. We hypothesized that facial expressions of happiness and anger would serve as primes to modulate subjective and neural responses to subsequently presented negative information. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a functional MRI study in which the brains of healthy adults were scanned while they performed an emotion-rating task. During the task, participants viewed a series of negative and neutral photos, one at a time; each photo was presented after a picture showing a face expressing a happy, angry, or neutral emotion. Brain imaging results showed that compared with neutral primes, happy facial primes increased activation during negative emotion in the dorsal anterior cingulated cortex and the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, which are typically implicated in conflict detection and implicit emotion control, respectively. Conversely, relative to neutral primes, angry primes activated the right middle temporal gyrus and the left supramarginal gyrus during the experience of negative emotion. Activity in the amygdala in response to negative emotion was marginally reduced after exposure to happy primes compared with angry primes. Relative to neutral primes, angry facial primes increased the subjectively experienced intensity of negative emotion. The current study results suggest that prior exposure to facial expressions of emotions modulates the subsequent experience of negative emotion by implicitly activating the emotion-regulation system.

The Role of Emotion Regulation in Reducing Emotional Distortions of Duration Perception

“…Considering that the perceived duration of negative stimuli tends to be overestimated compared to positive stimuli ( Gan et al, 2009 ; Lake et al, 2016 ), and most studies of emotion regulation focused on reducing negative emotions (e.g. Aldao et al, 2015 ; Sheppes et al, 2015 ; Yoon et al, 2015 ), negative and neutral pictures were selected as stimuli in this study. To avoid any potential interaction between reappraisal and suppression, each participant was allocated to only one of these experimental conditions.…”

Temporal course of implicit emotion regulation during a Priming-Identify task: an ERP study

“…Growing evidences show that a priming technique could effectively activate and manipulate emotion regulation goals without consciousness 19 , leading to attenuated emotion experience and physiological responses like heart-rate reactivity or electrophysiology responding 8 20 . The activated emotion regulation goals may then induce implicit emotion regulation processing and lead to emotion experiences and responses 8 21 .…”

Different Neural Correlates of Automatic Emotion Regulation at Implicit and Explicit Perceptual Level: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study

“…(2008) and the crucial regions found to be associated with emotion regulation in the existing literature, the following areas were selected as ROIs: bilateral ACC (left: x = −4, y = 38, z = 28; right: x = 4, y = 38, z = 28), bilateral OFC (left: x = −26, y = 24, z = −22; right: x = 26, y = 24, z = −22), dorsomedial prefrontal cortex ( x = −2, y = 52, z = 40), left dlPFC ( x = −42, y = 10, z = 26), left vlPFC ( x = −58, y = 24, z = 6), right parahippocampal gyrus or hippocampus (x = 29, y = −23, z = −11), and left amygdala ( x = −18, y = 0, z = 18). The ROI masks were created as spheres with a 6 mm radius, centered on MNI coordinates identified in previous research (Banks, Eddy, Angstadt, Nathan, & Phan, 2007; Das et al., 2005; Grimm et al., 2009; Hallam et al., 2015; Williams et al., 2001; Yoon et al., 2015). With reference to the thresholds previously adopted (Koch et al., 2007), a voxel-wise intensity threshold ( p < .001, uncorrected) and a spatial extent threshold of cluster size greater than 40 voxels were used for the brain regions selected a priori.…”

“…It was expected that inhibition word priming condition (as compared with neutral priming condition) will lead to less negative emotional experiences, since priming inhibition word would induce effective AER to those negative pictures. Previous studies showed that automatic or implicit emotion regulation in the conscious level is associated with activity in OFC, amygdala, mPFC, and vlPFC (Hallam et al., 2015; Lieberman et al., 2007; Yoon et al., 2015). Meanwhile, the bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) is involved in effortful executive processing (Golkar et al., 2012; Vanderhasselt, Raedt, Baeken, Leyman, & D’haenen, 2006).…”

“…It has been suggested that the right vlPFC is implicated in inhibitory control (Aron, Robbins, & Poldrack, 2014) and is the implicit form of emotion control (Cohen, Berkman, & Lieberman, 2013). Yoon, Kim, and Kim (2015) speculated that nonconscious emotion regulation was mediated by the right vlPFC based on the findings of their study where the facial expression was used to prime the implicit regulation of the negative picture. However, Tupak et al (2014) indicated that the specificity of vlPFC is to activate with respect to stimulus valence during labeling of picture task.…”