The Unconscious Emotional Regulation: Cognitive Reappraisal And Expressive Suppression Regulate Emotional Response

Emotion has long been recognized as a powerful influencing factor on human judgments and behavior, yet its function or purpose in our lives has been debated throughout intellectual history. Regulation of emotion is thus needed whenever conflict occurred between the responses suggested by the emotion and those called for by one's current goals. Most of extant literatures have dealt much with voluntary emotion regulation, which neglecting automatic emotion regulation. Based on previous studies, the present research combined results from emotion regulation and automation, especially in automatic goal pursuit field. Subjective reports, biofeedback measurement, event-related potential (ERP) and other techniques were designed to explore the unconscious emotion regulation on emotional responses of college students. The whole dissertation included six parts.In the first part of the dissertation, a review on the definitions, theories, and research methods of emotion regulation, emotion regulation strategies, and nonconscious goals were presented. The author focused on the definition, research status and the relationship with emotion regulation strategies (e.g., cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression) formed in consicous and unconscious levels. Based on these analyses, this research's significance and theoretical assumptions were brought forward in the second part.The third part consisted of three studies. The first study used laboratory experimental measurement to address implementation intentions and goal intentions' effectiveness in regulating emotional reactivity. Disgust-eliciting stimuli were viewed under 3 different self-regulation instructions:the goal intention to not get disgusted, this goal intention furnished with an implementation intention (i.e., an expressive suppression plan), and a no-self-regulation control group. Only implementation intention participants succeeded in reducing their disgust reactions as compared to goal intention and control participants. These results revealed that implementation intention was more effective in consicous emotion regulation as compared to goal intention. Based on the first study, the second study used conscious (implementation intentions combined) and unconscious (sentence unscrambling task) priming method to examine the role of nonconscious emotion regulation playing in the effect process of emotion regulation, and the role of conscious emotion regulation playing in the regulation of emotional responses were compared. Research showed that emotion regulation primed at unconscious and conscious levels were both effective. Cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression primed at unconscious levels could get adaptive outcomes, which means that they could succeed in down-regulating individuals'negative emotional experience and physiological responses. Expressive suppression's roles in down-regulating negative emotional experience and physiological responses were better at unconscious levels than conscious levels.The third study was based on the fist two studies. It assessed the electrocortical correlates of self-regulation of emotion through unconscious cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression. ERPs served as measures of these brain correlates, as we were interested in the question of the temporal dynamics of the processing of emotional pictures. Electro-cortical correlates revealed differential early visual activities in response to disgust pictures in unconscious cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression participants, as reflected in a smaller P1. Specifically, in the early stages of visual processing, unconscious expressive suppression would reduce the processing degree for emotional stimuli (especially negative stimuli) in parietal and occipital regions. Forming unconscious cognitive reappraisal would also reduce the processing degree for emotional stimuli in the parietal area. P1 amplitude significantly reduction was its feature. In the later stages of visual processing, unconscious cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression would lead to lower mean amplitudes of late positive potential (LPP) than control groups pictures. It indicated that the two unconscious emotion regulation strategies could effectively regulate sustained attentive processing due to appetitive or defensive motivational significance of the stimuli. According to the occurrence time of regulation, unconscious expressive suppression was earlier than unconscious cognitive reappraisal. Unconscious processing of emotion regulation might be more associated in the parietal and the occipital region. The P1 latency in the parietal and occipital region was significantly faster than the frontal, and late positive potential also first showed in the parietal and the occipital region. In addition, in a period of time after emotional stimuli presented (450ms or less), the attention and perceptual processing in the visual cortex showed emotions and non-emotional differences, its features were P1 and LPP amplitude increased significantly in the negative stimulus condition. However, as time unfolded, the differences disappeared.The third, forth and fifth part of the dissertation were general discussions of the whole research. Based on the results of this research and others, the author demonstrated the effect mechanisms of conscious and unconscious emotion regulation to regulate emotional responses. We also discussed the neural mechanisms of unconscious emotion regulation. At last, the value and problem of this research and pointed out the future direction of such research were also discussed.