Regulation of negative emotions in high trait anxious individuals: An ERP study.

Abstract

Literature has shown that failures in the ability to down-regulate negative emotions are the core substrate of anxiety disorders. Previous studies have investigated this issue by encouraging individuals to voluntarily change how they think about a situation in order to decrease its emotional impact. The majority of studies has demonstrated that explicit instructions to reduce negative affect in anxious individuals are usually ineffective. Thus, the goal of the present study was to investigate whether an implicit regulation strategy would modulate electrophysiological activity (Late Positive Potential) associated to affective picture viewing. The Late Positive Potential (LPP) is a sustained positive deflection in the event-related potential that is larger following the presentation of emotional compared to neutral visual stimuli. Participants (low trait anxious -LTA and high trait anxious -HTA individuals) performed an attention task (bar orientation discrimination) while emotional distractive pictures were presented. The task was performed in two different contexts: in the Real context, participants were informed that the distractive pictures had been obtained from real life situations, whereas in the Fictitious context they were told that the pictures had been obtained from movie scenes. In this vein, we encouraged participants to change how they appraised the pictures. Results showed that HTA individuals exhibited larger Late Positive Potential (LPPs) when mutilation pictures were presented in the Real context. Importantly, during the Fictitious one (regulation strategy) the LPP was reduced even in HTA individuals, emphasizing its importance to psychotherapeutic interventions. The present results indicate that HTA individuals are susceptible to modifications in affective contexts.

Brief Meditation and the Interaction between Emotional Interference and Anxiety

“…Evidence shows that the use of cognitive strategies to regulate emotions, such as attention allocation, can be undermined by high levels of anxiety (Berggren & Derakshan, 2013;Mocaiber et al, 2009;Sheppes, Luria, Fukuda, & Gross, 2013), in line with results showing that affective states may be as important as cognitive skills for the regulation of emotions (Kanske & Kotz, 2012).…”

“…Finally, our findings contribute to the discussions regarding the mechanisms that underlie and foster emotion regulation skills (Bishop, 2007;Derryberry & Reed, 2002;Kanske & Kotz, 2012;Mocaiber et al, 2009;Oliveira et al, 2013;Sheppes et al, 2013), and support the proposition that meditation may be a valuable strategy for the study of regulatory processes (Menezes, Pereira, & Bizarro, 2012). However, our results should be extended and complemented by larger scale trials, as well as by the usage of more ecologically valid measures.…”

“…From a psychological perspective, evidence shows that higher levels of anxiety can influence bias to negative emotions (Bishop, 2007), undermine the effectiveness of cognitive regulation of negative emotion (Mocaiber et al, 2009;Sheppes et al, 2013), and interfere in the performance of conflict resolution for negative emotional stimuli (Kanske & Kotz, 2012). More recently, it has been demonstrated that anxiety is particularly impairing in the context of disengaging attention from negative stimuli (Sheppes et al, 2013).…”

Applying learning algorithms to extract anxiety levels using the heart rate variability measure

“…[36] Moreover, a number of neuroscientific studies have employed scales to detect anxiety levels and have associated the scores obtained with hormonal, behavioral, neurophysiological and cardiac parameters. [13,32] Mocaiber and colleagues (2009) showed that HTA individuals are susceptible to modifications in affective contexts. Participants (LTA and HTA individuals) performed an attention task (bar orientation discrimination) while emotional distractive pictures (mutilated bodies) were presented.…”

“…TA has been also considered as an important predictor of cardiovascular disease. [13] In a previous study of our group, [14] the putative role of basal HRV as predictor of anxiety and affect levels was tested by means of wavelet transform tools in a non-clinical population of undergraduate students. Anxiety level (trait anxiety) was evaluated through Spielberg's State and Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI-T) [15,16] and positive and negative affect scores were measured through the Positive (PA) and Negative (NA) Affect Schedule (PANAS).…”