Mechanism And Application On Implicit Attitude To Emotion Regulation Modulating Emotional Reactivity

Emotion regulation includes both conscious and unconscious processes. Most of extant literatures have dealt much with voluntary emotion regulation, which neglect automatic emotion regulation. Recent studies have begun to pay attention to the process of automatic emotion regulation. These researches on emotion regulation can be divided into two dimensions—the implicit represented emotion regulation and automatic emotion regulation responses elicited by nonconscious goals. In the present research, based on the integration on voluntary emotion regulation, automatic emotion regulation, implicit represented emotion regulation and automatic emotion regulation responses, the author attempted to bring insights of the effectiveness of implicit attitude to emotion regulation in modulatinging emotional reactivity. Further more, making the youth groups of developmental and clinical emotional disorder such as depression and anxiety as the subject investigated, the author aimed to test the close relation between emotional problems such as depression and anxiety, and the features of implicit attitude to emotion regulation. The whole dissertation included three parts.In the first part of the dissertation, a review on the definition, theories and research methods of emotion regulation, automatic emotion regulation and implicit attitude to emotion regulation was presented. The author focused on the definition and research status of automatic emotion regulation and implicit attitude to emotion regulation. Based on these analyses, the theory hypothesis and the research assumption were brought forward.The second part consists of a series of empirical studies, which focused on the mechanisms implicit attitude to emotion regulation which modulating emotional reactivity and the application on teenagers who has depressed and anxious problems. The first three studies reveal the mechanisms of implicit attitude to emotion regulation which modulating emotional reactivity. The next part explored the features of implicit attitude to emotion regulation in adolescence of different levels of depression and anxiety. At last, the author employed ERP to investigate the possible underlying neural mechanism of which the implicit attitude to emotion regulation affects emotional stimulus process. The details are showed as following:In study 1, the author primed implicit attitude to emotion regulation by experimental method, then chose causal design to explore its effect on emotional reactivity. The result indicated that greater positive implicit attitude to emotion regulation associated with lower negative emotion experience and better physiological reactivity. In order to completely reveal the mediate processing and the importance of nonconscious goals between implicit attitude to emotion regulation and emotional reactivity, and also to support the theory of automatic goal pursuit, study 2 assessed the effectiveness of implicit attitude to emotion regulation primed unconsciously and nonconscious goals primed via a scrambled sentences task on emotional reactivity. The result supported the theory of automatic goal pursuit in automatic emotion regulation domain. It revealed that implicit attitude to emotion regulation once activated could form emotion regulation goals automatically, thus affect emotion regulation responses, and also change the orbit of individual emotional reactivity. Namely, implicit attitude to emotion regulation and automatic emotion regulation responses could be associated by nonconscious goals, thus constitute the automatic emotion regulation processing. Although illustrating that the processing which automatic emotion regulation modulating emotional reactivity, the first two studies failed to demonstrate the fact that when voluntary and automatic emotion regulation were co-existence, and both conscious and nonconscious goals were activated simultaneously, automatic emotional behavior elicited by nonconscious goals would appear or not. Therefore, taking implicit attitude to emotion regulation and emotion regulation strategies as automatic and voluntary emotion regulation's representation respectively, study 3 was to investigate their regulation function on emotional reactivity. The result indicated that implicit attitude to emotion regulation would effect on emotional reactivity even when voluntary emotion regulation strategies were added. Both implicit attitude to emotion regulation and voluntary emotion regulation strategies played respective part in emotion regulation. This result further revealed that implicit attitude to emotion regulation was important in modulating emotional reactivity. Study 4 applied the result of the first 3 studies to adolescence of depression and anxiety. Making the youth groups of developmental and clinical emotional disorder such as depression and anxiety as the subject investigated, it aimed to test features of implicit attitude to emotion regulation. The result showed that both high anxiety and depression individuals associated with greater positive implicit attitude to emotion regulation, the higher level of anxiety and depression, the more they inclined to negative implicit attitude to emotion regulation. With the raise of anxious levels, individuals tended to use rumination and suppress strategies instead of ignore strategies habitually when facing to negative stimulus. With the raise of depress levels, individuals tended to use suppress strategies habitually when facing to negative stimulus. In addition, the author found that the subjects who hold positive implicit attitude to emotion regulation were inclined to use more cognitive ignore strategies and less cognitive rumination strategies. These results indicated that intervention to anxiety and depression problems could be done via changing implicit attitude to emotion regulation and relative emotion regulation strategies. In study 5, the author investigated the difference in processing emotional stimulus when individuals in difference levels of anxiety and depression whose implicit attitude to emotion regulation activated. The result indicated that when holding negative implicit attitude to emotion regulation, high anxiety and depression individuals would concerned exterior stimulus later, but automatically bate the emotion effect of exterior stimulus and employ more cognitive resource in the phase of sensory process. It suggested that these individuals processing less to exterior stimulus in early visual processing phase. In face structure coding and initial emotion regulation phase, these individuals had to cost a longer period of time and effort to complete the relative effective regulation in negative emotional context. They employ less cognitive resource and a shorter period of time to process exterior emotion stimulus in the phase of higher mental processing, which leading to anxiety and depression.The third part of the dissertation was a general discussion and conclusion of the whole research. Based on the results of this research and others, the author demonstrated the mechanisms of implicit attitude to emotion regulation, automatic emotion regulation and its neural mechanism of adolescence of depression and anxiety. At last, the author analyzed the limitation of this research and pointed out the future direction of such research.