The Effect Of Emotion Regulation On Prototype Elicitation During Insight Problem Solving

Recently, the study that emotion regulation will affect the cognitive activities is very popular. The explanations for the effect have two different attitudes, the "emotional route" suggests that the different emotional experience after different emotion regulation is the main cause. The other is "nonemotional route", which emphasizes the different consumption in the cognitive resource after different emotion regulation. The constructive influence of emotion regulation on the cognitive activities concentrating on memory, reasoning and decision-making, especially the creative thinking hasn’t been involved. The insight problem is regarded as the core of creative thinking, so the study of insight problem might reveal the mechanism of creative thinking. This research introduces the paradigm of cognitive reappraisal and expression suppression into "learning-test" paradigm of insight problem solving. The participants are induced by different emotional states and adopt different emotion regulation strategies, examining how the emotion regulation affect the insight problem solving.In experiment1, we discuss the different emotion regulation strategies (cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression) affect insight problem solving under negative emotions. The results showed that:(1) Only cognitive reappraisal significantly reduced the participants’intensity of negative emotions, the intensity of expressive suppression was slightly higher than the simple watch, but no significant differences.(2) Emotion regulation strategies had a significant impact on solving the target puzzles, the scores of cognitive reappraisal were significantly better than expressive suppression and simple watch, the results between simple watch and expressive suppression did not differ significantly. In experiment2, we discuss the different emotion regulation strategies, including cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression, affect insight problem solving under positive emotions. The results showed that:(1) When participants took cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppressive strategies, the intensity of positive emotional was significantly lower than simple watch. It meant that the cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression are equivalent to reduce the intensity of positive emotion.(2) The scores of target puzzle about cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression are significantly higher than that of simple watch, but the scores between them did not differ significantly.In conclusion, this study suggests that emotion regulation affect the insight problem solving. Although there are differences in the consumption of cognitive resources between cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression, but it does not affect the subsequent insight problem solving, so this study proves the view of "emotional route".