Regulating Rumination by Anger: Evidence for the Mutual Promotion and Counteraction (MPMC) Theory of Emotionality

Abstract

Unlike the strategy of cognitive regulation that relies heavily on the top-down control function of the prefrontal cortex (PFC), which was recently found may be critically impaired in stressful situations, traditional Chinese philosophy and medicine views different types of emotionality as having mutual promotion and counteraction (MPMC) relationships, implying a novel approach that requires less cognition to emotional regulation. Actually, our previous studies have indicated that anger responses could be successfully regulated via the induction of sadness, and this efficiency could not be influenced by stress, thus providing evidences for the hypothesis of “sadness counteracts anger” (SCA) proposed by the MPMC theory of emotionality (Zhan et al., 2015, 2017). In this study, we experimentally examined the MPMC hypothesis that “anger counteracts rumination” (ACR) which postulates that rumination may be alleviated by the anger emotion. In Study 1, all participants were initially caused state rumination and then induced anger, joy or neutral mood, the results showed that the rumination-related affect was alleviated after anger induction relative to that after joy or neutral mood induction. In Study 2, female participants with high trait rumination were recruited and divided into two groups for exposure to an anger or neutral emotion intervention, the result indicated that the anger intervention group exhibited a greater decline in trait rumination than the neutral emotion intervention group. These findings provided preliminary evidence supporting the hypothesis of ACR, which suggested a new strategy that employs less cognitive resources to regulating state and trait rumination by inducing anger.

Mind–Body Health Technique Liu Zi Jue: Its Creation, Transition, and Formalization

“…For example, if a person is angry, it is better to use "anxiety to counteract anger" and choose the tone of Shang, corresponding to sadness, to restrain anger. Experimental research has indicated that "sadness counteracts anger" (Zhan et al, 2015;Zhan, Wu, et al, 2017) and "anger counteracts rumination (thinking)" (Zhan, Tang, et al, 2017). These results provide support to the mutual promotion and counteraction theory of emotionality and its combination with the theory of five viscera harmonizing pitch.…”

Questionnaires based on natural language processing elicit immersive ruminative thinking in ruminators: Evidence from behavioral responses and EEG data

“…The immersive ruminative questionnaire elicited immersive ruminative thinking, specifically in the ruminators Previous studies have used various methods to induce rumination, including short statement prompts (Cooney et al, 2010;Berman et al, 2014;Milazzo et al, 2016), texts extracted from Wikipedia (Curci et al, 2015), characteristic words (Yoshimura et al, 2009;Moran et al, 2014;Apazoglou et al, 2019), music clips (Figueroa et al, 2017), self-reports (Rosenbaum et al, 2018a), emotive facial expressions (Aker et al, 2014), goal prompting tasks (Zhan et al, 2017;Mollaahmetoglu et al, 2021), videos (Bostanov et al, 2018), and other materials. However, it remains unclear whether these methods successfully induce subjects' rumination.…”

Rumiación y abuso sexual infantil. Dolor cíclico y estrategias terapéuticas

“…En la experiencia clínica, tal pérdida de apoyo genera vulnerabilidades para procesos de polivictimización, y en consecuencia, en población adolescente que utiliza la rumiación como estrategia para lidiar con afectos negativos, podría significar aislamiento y, a su vez, menores redes sociales para enfrentar situaciones de hostigamiento de pares u otros grupos. Otra de las formas de enfrentar los procesos rumiativos, y que ayuda a la generación de este contexto de soledad, es la tendencia para lidiar con la rumiación o intentar parar este proceso mediante la agresión, ya sea hacia sí mismo o hacia otros (Zhan et al, 2017). Esto tendría como efecto el alejamiento de las personas, aumentando el bajo apoyo social.…”

“…Otra asociación que se ha realizado en relación con la rumiación en ASI, es la conexión con el enojo (Zhan et al, 2017). Tal emoción, tiene el potencial de permitir, de otra forma, iniciar estrategias de evasión de pensamientos negativos centrados en la propia persona (Ibíd.).…”