Neural underpinnings of the relationships between sensation seeking and emotion regulation in adolescents

Abstract

There is little neurological evidence linking sensation seeking and emotion regulation in adolescence, which is characterised as an emotionally fluctuant period. The present study examined the relationship between sensation seeking and emotion regulation in adolescents. Electroencephalograms were recorded from 22 high sensation‐seeking adolescents (HSSs, Mage = 12.36) and 24 low sensation‐seeking adolescents (LSSs, Mage = 12.84) during the reactivity and regulation‐image task. Group differences in event‐related brain potentials (ERPs) associated with the regulation of negative and neutral stimuli were analysed. The results showed that (a) the P2 of HSSs were larger than LSSs during emotion regulation; (b) in down‐regulation conditions, the LPP in all time windows were smaller than no‐regulation in LSSs. However, there was no significant difference in HSSs; (c) the LPP 300–600 and LPP 1000–1500 of down‐regulation were smaller in LSSs than HSSs; (d) for LPP 600–1000, HSSs induced larger LPP than LSSs in the negative down‐regulation and negative no‐regulation conditions. The results provide neurological evidence that higher sensation seeking is related to the high reactivity to emotional stimuli and poor cognitive control during the regulation of emotions.

The Immediate and Lasting Effect of Emotion Regulation in Adolescents: An ERP Study

“…Many studies have suggested that ERP indices of emotion regulation are related to modulations in attentional regulatory processes (e.g., P1, N2, P3, and early LPP components related to salience detection, stimulus-driven orientation, and attentional control) and cognitive regulatory processes (e.g., late LPPs related to cognitive control, meaning evaluation, and response modulation) [23][24][25][26].…”

“…The late positive potential (LPP) is evident as a broad superior posterior positive signal that occurs approximately 300 to 400 ms after stimulus onset [22]. In most studies of LPP, researchers divided this positive slow wave into different time windows and examined the average amplitude of the LPP within the relatively long time window [22,26,32]. The LPP reflects the facilitated attention to emotional stimuli; that is, it is not only sensitive to emotional stimulation itself but its time course is also an indicator of the emotion regulation process [33].…”

Sensation seeking predicts risky driving behavior: The mediating role of difficulties in emotion regulation

“…Research has shown that people who are high in sensation seeking, such as shopaholics, exhibit weaker self‐regulation and more limited strategies for regulating their emotions than normal people (Williams & Grisham, 2012). People with high sensation seeking were more responsive to emotional stimuli and had weaker cognitive control in emotional regulation in an electroencephalogram experiment (Deng & Zhang, 2020). Some researchers postulated that the stronger the emotional responsiveness of individuals, the more difficult it is for them to regulate their emotions; that is, individuals with high emotional responsiveness are more likely to have difficulty regulating their emotions (Nock et al., 2008).…”