Individual Differences in Spontaneous Expressive Suppression Predict Amygdala Responses to Fearful Stimuli: The Role of Suppression Priming

Abstract

Though the spontaneous emotion regulation has received long discussions, few studies have explored the regulatory effects of spontaneous expressive suppression in neural activations, especially in collectivistic cultural context. The functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study aimed to examine whether individual differences in the tendency to use suppression are correlated with amygdala responses to negative situations when individuals are unconsciously primed with expressive suppression. Twenty-three healthy Chinese undergraduates completed an fMRI paradigm involving fear processing, and a synonym matching task was added to prime participants with the unconscious (automatic) expressive suppression goal. Participants completed measures of typical emotion regulation use (reappraisal and suppression), trait anxiety, and neuroticism. Results indicated that only in emotion suppression prime condition, greater use of suppression in everyday life was related to decreased amygdala activity. These associations were not attributable to variation in trait anxiety, neuroticism, or the habitual use of reappraisal. These findings suggest that in collectivistic cultural settings, individual differences in expressive suppression do not alter fear-related neural activation during suppression-irrelevant context. However, unconscious suppression priming facilitates the manifestation of individual differences in the neural consequence of expressive suppression, as reflected by the priming-specific decrease of emotional subcortical activations with more use of expressive suppression.

Neurophysiological Correlates of Collective Trauma Recall in 2009 L'Aquila Earthquake Survivors

“…However, we did not find this in the present study and instead found that the survivors showed lower prefrontal activation. A possible explanation of this incongruence could be that in the present study, the time elapsed from the traumatic event (about five years) could have facilitated the use of this distancing strategy with a lesser cognitive cost, as suggested by a recent study in which individuals with a higher unconscious and habitual use of suppression showed lesser amygdala activation in response to negative stimuli (Chen et al., ). Moreover, the lower intensity of the survivors’ prefrontal cortex found in the present study is consistent with that reported in previous studies in which the responsivity of this region has been shown to be inversely correlated with the performance of emotional cognitive tasks and symptom severity in a PTSD population (Lanius et al., ; Shin, Rauch, & Pitman, ).…”

Cryptic Emotions and the Emergence of a Metatheory of Mind in Popular Filmmaking

“…Yet the Kuleshov “effect,” if it exists at all in this three‐shot format, does so only under extremely circumscribed conditions (Barratt, Cabak Rédei, Innes‐Ker, & van de Weijer, 2016; Calbi et al., 2017; Mobbs et al., 2006; Prince & Hensley, 1992). Hochberg and Brooks (1996, p. 265) explained why: “Despite Eisenstein's (1949) assertion that two pieces of film of any kind, when placed in juxtaposition, inevitably combine into a new concept of quality, there is no reason to believe that without specific effort at construal by the viewer anything other than a meaningless flight of visual fragments … will be perceived.” In other words, the filmmakers must first win over the viewer to the narrative and the diegetic world before any mind reading will link the separate shots (see also Cutting, 2005).…”

“…But its shaky status does not undermine the power of the reaction shot, and the importance of a larger context (Calbi et al., 2017). As Barrett (2017), Bering (2002), and Zunshine (2012) have suggested, we do read faces in an obligatory manner, easily and sometimes wrongly imputing emotions and intentions—but we have to know and believe the context.…”

Sustainable and conventional banking in Europe

“…However, banks did not act illegally, but they exhibited a lack of morality. In fact, the causes of such severe crisis were not only economic, but also ethical; in this sense, we can consider individual moral failures, ethical failure related to management or governance, and social ethics failure [2].…”