Influences Of Automatically Emotional Regulated Goals Pursuit On Anticipatory Emotion Experience And Physiological Activity

Our daily life is always filled with varieties of emotion and these emotion may frequently founded when individuals in dream of future events. Anticipatory emotion is generated in the process of expectations of future results, while feelings at that moment happen before the results. Emotion impacts individual’s cognitive processes, decision-making, and physical-mental health. Most research focused on the concern of this ’expectation’ cognitive process but ignored the emotional experience during the process of anticipation and studies on regulation of this kind of emotion are even fewer. With the development of unconscious goals theories in the field of self-regulation and technology of unconscious goals activation, this study attempts to use unconscious goal activation method to regulate anticipatory emotions. Anticipatory emotions were induced by expecting the specific content and unconscious goal was activated by sentence unscrambling task.This study consists of a pretest and three studies. The pre-study was designed to explore differences between positive, neutral and negative anticipatory emotions, to select twenty-four pictures which would be used in the primary experiments, and also to explore how much time would be used when the subjects calm down after emotion pictures’ stimulation. In study1, the positive expectation condition was replaced by the unknown condition. It firstly aimed to find out distinct effects of neutral, negative and unknown anticipatory conditions on subjects’ subjective anxiety and physiological, moreover, it attempts to discover whether goals of emotionally regulated activation would impact on individuals’ emotion experience. Based on study1, study2try to explore impacts of time pressure on anticipatory emotion and find out the emotional regulation process.Results are as follows:(1) Participants’ skin conductance responses were significantly different between positive, neutral and negative anticipatory emotions. In negative and positive expectations conditions, participants’ skin conductance responses were higher than in the neural condition, but no difference between them.(2) Participants’ physiological arousal (SCR) would calm down during17seconds.(3) In negative and unknown expectation condition, participants had much higher skin conductance responses and subjective anxiety, but no difference was found between negative and unknown expectation conditions(4) Regardless of the presence or absence of time pressure, unconsciously emotional goal activation would effectively reduce the extent of skin conductance responses. This effect was the same in the consciously emotional goal activation condition.(5) Time pressure increased the extent of skin conductance responses, but had no significant effects on heart rate and subjective anxiety.(6) In this study the heart rate cannot be impacted by emotion regulation and time pressure, and heart rate has no significantly difference between different anticipatory emotions.