Temporal Dynamics of Emotion Regulation Strategies: An ERP Study

Abstract: Distraction and cognitive reappraisal are two widely used types of emotional regulation strategies that are thought to be reliable when down-regulating our emotions to negative or unpleasant stimuli. Gross‘s process model of emotion generation (Gross, 1998) holds that they differ in the time they intervene in the emotiongenerative process and also how they impact emotional responses when they are used to regulate negative emotions. Distraction which involves attentional deployment is expected to operate earlier than reappraisal that entails meaning evaluation and reevaluation. Cognitive reappraisal encompasses various strategies that are used to regulate our emotions through reinterpretation. Self-focused and situation-focused reappraisal are two of them. The former is considered more efficient and thus would lead to a greater attenuation of the LPPthan the latter. To test this prediction, electrocortical responses to angry faces when using these strategies were measured using the late positive potential (LPP). Twenty four healthy participants were recruited for the study and were cued to down-regulate their emotions using these strategies while angry and neutral facial stimuli were seen on a computer screen. Contrary to prediction, distraction did not modulate the LPP earlier than reappraisal. However, supporting our hypothesis self-focused strategies largely modulated the LPP than situation-focused strategy. The pattern of result suggests that reappraisal might have an influence on the early neural processes of emotion generation and that the subcategories of cognitive reappraisal have a differential effect on emotional regulation.