Reappraisal Modulates Attentional Bias to Angry Faces

Abstract

Heightened attentional bias to emotional information is one of the main characteristics of disorders related to emotion dysregulation such as anxiety, depression, and substance abuse. Although reappraisal, an emotion regulation strategy, is known to effectively modulate subjective experience of emotions, it remains unknown whether reappraisal can alter attentional biases to emotional information. In the current research, we investigated the influence of instruction-induced state reappraisal (Study 1) and trait reappraisal (Study 2) on attentional biases to happy and angry faces. In Study 1, healthy young women were recruited and randomly assigned to one of the three groups: up-, down-, and no-regulation. Participants were instructed to reappraise their emotions to increase and decrease emotional experience while viewing an emotionally negative film clip. Attentional bias was assessed with a dot-probe task with pictures of angry and happy facial expressions. In Study 2, a separate group of healthy young men and women participated. Participants’ trait reappraisal and suppression as well as state and trait anxiety were assessed. A dot-probe task was completed by all participants. Statistical tests in Study 1 revealed that participants who reappraised to decrease negative emotions while viewing an emotionally negative film clip had reduced attentional bias to subsequently presented angry faces compared to participants who reappraised to increase negative emotions. Multiple regression analyses in Study 2 revealed that trait reappraisal predicted slower orienting toward angry faces, whereas state anxiety predicted slower disengagement from angry faces. Interestingly, trait suppression predicted slower disengagement from happy faces. Taken together, these results suggest that both instruction-induced state reappraisal and trait reappraisal are linked to reduced attentional bias to negative information and contribute to better understanding of how everyday emotion regulation styles contribute to attentional processing of emotional information.

How state anxiety and attentional bias interact with each other: The moderating effect of cognitive appraisal

“…Jamieson, Nock, and Mendes (2012) found that changes in cognitive appraisal of a stress task could improve cardiovascular function and reduce attentional bias to negative stimuli. Kim, Kim, and Kim (2016) found that participants' attentional bias toward anger pictures decreased after reducing cognitive appraisal of the negative emotion, and that such bias increased after increasing cognitive appraisal of the negative emotion. Accordingly, we hypothesized that cognitive appraisal would moderate the relationship between state anxiety and attentional bias (Hypothesis 3, H3).…”

Effects of vicarious disgust learning on the development of fear, disgust, and attentional biases in children.

“…Several analyses were carried out on the dot probe reaction time (RT) data. Initially, all incorrect responses were excluded as well as RTs less than 200 ms, which were considered so short as to be guesses (see also Britton et al, 2013;Kim, Kim, & Kim, 2016;Miloff, Savva, & Carlbring, 2015;Reynolds et al, 2014Reynolds et al, , 2018. Log RTs were used to adjust for large outliers (see Ratcliff, 1993).…”

An Online Assessment to Evaluate the Role of Cognitive Biases and Emotion Regulation Strategies for Mental Health During the COVID-19 Lockdown of 2020: Structural Equation Modeling Study

“…Importantly, individual differences in the habitual use of emotion regulation strategies are related to the modulation of these forms of affective processing, contributing to maladaptive stress regulation. The habitual use of reappraisal, a strategy typically associated with enhanced stress recovery [18], has been found to modulate attention directed to negative information [19]. Further, the momentary use of reappraisal has been found to predict higher positive interpretation biases to solve ambiguities [20].…”