Suppression and enhancement of emotional responses to unpleasant pictures

Abstract

Despite the prominence of emotional dysfunction in psychopathology, relatively few experiments have explicitly studied emotion regulation in adults. The present study examined one type of emotion regulation: voluntary regulation of short-term emotional responses to unpleasant visual stimuli. In a sample of 48 college students, both eyeblink startle magnitude and corrugator activity were sensitive to experimental manipulation. Instructions to suppress negative emotion led to both smaller startle eyeblinks and decreased corrugator activity. Instructions to enhance negative emotion led to larger startle eyeblinks and increased corrugator activity. Several advantages of this experimental manipulation are discussed, including the use of both a suppress and an enhance emotion condition, independent measurement of initial emotion elicitation and subsequent regulation of that emotion, the use of a completely within-subjects design, and the use of naturalistic emotion regulation strategies.

The effect of cognitive reappraisal on physiological reactivity and emotional memory

“…Recent investigations of emotion regulation have shown that conscious attempts to increase and decrease emotion result in modulation of physiological and neural responses to emotional events (DanGlauser & Gross, 2011;Demaree et al, 2004;Dillon and LaBar, 2005;Driscoll et al, 2009;Jackson et al, 2000;Kim and Hamann, 2007;Lee et al, 2009;Mauss et al, 2007;Moser et al, 2006;Ochsner et al, 2004;Ray et al, 2010;Sheppes et al, 2009). For example, increased and decreased facial frown muscle activity were observed during reappraisal to increase and decrease negative emotions, respectively, in line with subjective affect report (Gross, 1998;Ray et al, 2010).…”

Affective style andin vivoimmune response: Neurobehavioral mechanisms

“…Startle measurement. Affect-modulated startle eye-blink magnitude was measured from silver-silver chloride electromyographic electrodes placed below the eye on the orbicularis oculi muscle in response to an acoustic startle probe (50-ms whitenoise burst at 95 dB with a near-instantaneous rise time) as described by Jackson et al (32). Startle eye-blink magnitude was calculated by subtracting the amount of integrated electromyographic activity at reflex onset from the maximum amount of integrated electromyographic activity between 20 and 120 ms after the probe onset.…”

Affective modulation of eyeblink reactions to noxious sural nerve stimulation: A supraspinal measure of nociceptive reactivity?☆

“…Nonetheless, the results of this research generally mirror what we have observed in our pain studies. Eyeblinks are facilitated by defensive activation (positive affect) and inhibited by appetitive activation (negative affect) (for reviews, Bradley et al, 1999;Grillon and Baas, 2003), although inhibition by appetitive activation is less robust (Grillon and Baas, 2003;Jackson et al, 2000). This modulation by affective valence 1 (the unpleasantness-pleasantness dimension of affect) is most reliable when the probe onset is between 3 and 5-s after onset of the affectinducing stimulus (3 to 5-s lead interval) (Bradley et al, 1993b(Bradley et al, , 2006, unless the task instructions are altered (e.g., Dichter et al, 2002;Vanman et al, 1996).…”