The Effect Of Working Memory Updating On Emotion Regulation

Difficulties in emotion regulation may lead to emotional problems,such as anxiety disorders,depression,which harm seriously individuals physical and mental health,so it is important to explore effective methods of negative emotion regulation.In addition to cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression strategies,researchers have paid attention to the role of executive function,especially working memory updating,in emotion regulation recently.Some studies showed that activating or training working memory updating can directly reduce negative emotion,while others indicated that updating and reappraisal both involve the rapid switching of cognitive contents and the processes of replacing old information with new information.Therefore,working memory updating decreases negative emotion by promoting cognitive reappraisal.Moreover,the far-transfer effects of working memory updating training on emotion regulation are controversial.In order to solve the above problems,the present dissertation divided into two parts to investigate the effect of working memory updating on emotion regulation.The first study explored respectively the effects of working memory updating and cognitive reappraisal on negative emotion regulation,and the effects of working memory updating on the regulation efficiency of conscious and automatic cognitive reappraisal.Experiment adopted a 2(working memory updating:with,without)× 3(cognitive reappraisal:conscious cognitive reappraisal,automatic cognitive reappraisal,none)between-subjects design,the subjective emotional experience and physiological reaction(EDA electrodermal activity,HR heart rate)of 120 subjects were recorded.The results demonstrated that working memory updating only effectively reduced EDA but not emotional experience,and both conscious and automatic cognitive reappraisal could significantly decrease negative emotion and EDA.Working memory updating promoted the emotion regulation efficiency of both conscious and automatic cognitive reappraisal,reducing anger self-rating,total score of negative emotion rating and EDA after reappraisal.There was no significant change in HR during negative emotion arousal and regulation.According to the results of study 1,the study 2 investigated the impacts of working memory updating training on the training task itself,untrained working memory task,and the regulation efficiency of conscious and automatic cognitive reappraisal.60 subjects were assigned randomly to the conscious or automatic cognitive reappraisal working memory updating training groups and the corresponding control groups.The training groups completed 20-day adaptive visual n-back training programs,the control groups took part in the simple digital parity judgment tasks in the same period of time.The results showed that the training groups not only significantly improved the correct rate and reaction time of the original tasks,but also completed the untrained spatial working memory updating tasks better than the active control groups.During the post-test phase,the decrease of anger feeling,total score of negative emotion and EDA in the conscious and automatic cognitive reappraisal working memory updating training groups were significantly higher than in the pre-test phase.The anger and negative emotion decreased more in the conscious cognitive reappraisal training group,and the EDA decreased more in the automatic cognitive reappraisal training group.In summary,working memory updating effectively reduced the EDA when watching negative film clips,but the effect on emotional subjective experience was not significant The results of the two studies supported that working memory updating decreased negative emotion by promoting cognitive reappraisal.Updating tasks and training both could significantly reduce negative emotional experience and EDA after conscious and automatic cognitive reappraisal.Adaptive working memory updating training has far-transfer effect on emotion regulation and has a wide application prospect.