The Passionate Love Promoted The Physiological Effect Of Cognitive Reappraisal

Passionate love is the early phase of romantic love. People in this stage often experience wildly and frequently passionate feelings to the objects they desired. Previous researches and life experience suggested that, the effects of cognitive reappraisal to emotional stimuli might be influenced by passionate love. The “Communal Responsiveness” Theory of romantic love proposed that, the loves might receive lots of social supports from their romantic relationship. And according to the Social Baseline Theory, subjects would save more cognitive resources due to the obtain social supports. Hence that, the new loves might benefit from their romantic relationship, and received more cognitive resources to be used in the cognitive reappraisal tasks than singles. Schneiderman and colleagues asked new loves and singles to watch four emotional film clips, then analyzed their Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia(RSA) data offline. The results showed that, when watching love-related negative clip, the RSA level decreased significantly in singles, but not in new loves. Since the decreased RSA level was associated with anxiety and depression in previous studies, the new loves showed a better automatic reactivity to negative, especially love-related negative stimuli than singles. However, this study did not ask subjects to regulate their emotion during the film, and the impact of passionate love on cognitive reappraisal was still unknown.Study one were to investigate the impact of passionate love on cognitive reappraisal directly. 76 college students participated in this study, 40 of them were singles, and 36 of them were new loves. The two sets of subjects were randomly assigned to control group or reappraisal group. Experimental stumuli were for standardized flim clips which could respectively induce subjects’ love-related positive emotion, love-unrelated positive emotion, love-related negative emotion, and the love-unrelated negative emotion. The control group was asked to simply watch the four cilps, and the reappraisal group was asked to perform the cognitive reappraisal to their induced emotion. The emotional experience and heart rate variability(HRV) were recorded during no task baseline and task phase. The HRV was an index of the automatic nervous system(ANS). The reducing of the HRV level were usually related to physiological stress and depression, but it would enhance after effective emotional reappraisal. The dependent variable of present study was the effect size of HRV, and we hypothesize that, the new loves would displayed significantly higher HRV effect size under both control and reappraisal conditions. The results showed that, the new lovers displayed a significanly higher HRV effect size than singles during watching emotional clips, regardless of the valence of the clips, and the relevance of the clips to romantic love. These results were consistent with previours findings, which suggested that the new loves owned a better automatic emotional reactivity relative to singles. More importantly, the present study found that, when asked subjects to perform the reappraisal task, the new lovers showed a significantly greater HRV effect size under the negative emotion. Tthese results suggested that, the passionate love promoted the physiological effect of cognitive reappraisal.However, according to study one, it was stilll unknown that whether the impact of passionate love on reappraisal occurred in other emotional regulation strategies. Hence that, we performed study two to investigate that whether the passionate love promoted the physiological effect of expressive suppression as same as the cognitive reappraisal. The “Communal Responsiveness” Theory of romantic love indicated that, the new loves were usually encouraged to express their demands and emotions freedomly, so that they might be less willing to suppress their feelings relative to singles. Marazziti and colleagues found that, as similar with obsessive compulsive disorder(OCD), new loves displayed significantly lower serotonin(5-HT) transporter level than singles. Since the activity of 5-HT played a pivotal role in behavioral control, results above suggested a significantly decreased capacity of behaviral control in new loves. Expressive suppression was a type of response control, so that we hypothesize that, the new lovers might displayed a worse performance than singles during the expressive suppression task.Study two invited 40 college students to participate in this experiment, 21 of them were singles, 19 of them were new lovers. The experimental stimuli and procedure were as same as study one, but all of the participants were asked to perform the expressive suppresion task in present study. We expected that, the new lovers would displayed a significantly lower HRV effect size than singles under the expressive suprression task. The results showed that, under the suppresion condition, new lover displayed significantly lower HRV effect size in love-unrelated positive rmotion, love-related negative emotio, and love-unrelated negative emotion. These results illustrated that, opposite to reappraisal, passionate love hamperd the physiological effect of expressive suppression.Results from these two study suggested that, passionate love promoted subjects’ physiological effect in cognitive reappraisal condition, but hampered it in expressive suppression condition.