The Emotion Regulation Of Socially Transmitted Fear

Socially transmitted fear is a way to acquire fear in life,mainly by observational learning or verbal learning.Compared to conditioned fear,socially transmitted fear is more common.But excessive socially transmitted fear may have a harmful effect on our lives.However,there is little literature about the impact of emotion regulation strategies on socially transmitted fear.Therefore,this study would help us in understanding the neural mechanisms underlying emotion regulation of socially transmitted fear and have certain significance for overcoming unnecessary socially transmitted fear in our daily lives.When people encounter stressful events,they often use emotion regulation strategies consciously or unconsciously.The conscious emotion regulation are deliberate,effortful conscious processes which aimed at emotion regulation.The unconscious emotion regulation are generally defined as a process designed to improve the quality,intensity,and duration of emotional reactions,without conscious awareness and purpose.Recent studies have shown that unconscious emotion regulation strategy could have emotion regulation effect with less cost of cognitive resources than conscious emotion regulation strategy.In this paper,the behavior method and functional magnetic resonance imaging(fMRI)were used to explore the regulatory effect of conscious and unconscious emotion regulation strategies on socially transmitted fear and the neural mechanism of emotion regulation of socially transmitted fear.This article included two studies:In study one explored the regulatory effects of conscious and unconscious emotion regulation strategies on socially transmitted fear through behavioral approach.The conscious emotion regulation strategy adopted the imagination strategy which demanded the subject to ignore threatening information deliberately,and to relax through imaging beautiful scene.The unconscious emotion regulation strategy was primed by synonym matching task.In synonym matching task,the subjects were asked to process the meaning of target word,which impelled subjects to form the emotion regulation goal unconsciously,and then achieved the regulatory effects of emotion regulation.The studies used classic instructed fear paradigm to induce socially transmitted fear.In the experiment,the subjects did not suffer an electric shock,but acquire the clues and socially transmitted fears only by the information of the main test.The experiment was a 3(regulation strategies: watching strategy,unconscious emotion regulation strategy,conscious imagination strategy)* 2(environment: threat,safety)within-subjects design.Experimental procedure: synonym matching task was presented firstly;then,the cues was presented and subjects were required to watch or to imagine according to cues;next,experimental stimulation was presented.Finally,the negative emotional experiences and the degree of involvement were recorded.The results showed that: 1)the subjects reported feeling more fear and worry in threat condition than in safety condition;2)It is more difficult for the subjects to image than to attend;3)the emotion effects was significantly smaller in conscious imagination condition than in watching condition,and no difference was found between watching and unconscious emotion regulation conditions.Because the study one was a behavioral experiment,only the subjective evaluation measured,the reliability deviation caused by demand characteristics could not be excluded.Demand characteristics: the subjects automatically generate some assumptions for the purpose of the experiment,and then react in a way to satisfy the assumption.Because high spatial resolution fMRI technology could synchronously observe the changes of cognitive control-related regions(dorsal anterior cingulate cortex,dorsolateral prefrontal cortex,inferior parietal lobule)and emotion-related brain regions(amygdala and insula),study two used fMRI technology.The procedure of study 2 was similar to that of study 1,but the time was longer.The negative emotion experiences and functional brain images were recorded.The results show that: 1)bilateral amygdala and bilateral insula activities were significantly higher in threat condition than in safety condition;2)The behavioral results of the study two were similar to those of the study one,and the negative emotion experiences were smaller in conscious imagination condition than in watching condition,and no difference was found between watching condition and unconscious emotion regulation conditions;3)the emotion effects of the left amygdala and left insula were significantly smaller in unconscious emotion regulation condition than in watching condition,and there were no significant difference between the conscious imagination condition and watching condition;4)the activities in bilateral inferior parietal lobule were significantly smaller in unconscious emotion regulation condition than in watching condition,and no difference was found in resting cognitive control-related regions;however the activity in left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex was significantly higher in conscious imagination condition than in watching condition,and no difference was found in resting cognitive control-related regions.Conscious imagination strategy in studies 1 and study 2 reduced the subjective negative emotional experience at the behavioral level,but no difference was observed at the neural level.Therefore,we suggested that conscious imagination strategy could reduce subjective negative emotional experience,but could not reduce the objective physiological response.Unconscious emotion regulation strategy did not reduce subjective negative emotion experiences in study 1 and study 2,but at the neural level,the reduction of objective physiological response was observed.The unconscious emotion regulation strategy could regulate objective physiological response,but could not regulate the subjective negative emotional experience.The conscious imagination strategy need lots of cognitive resources,while the unconscious emotion regulation strategy needs less.Combined with results of cognitive control-related regions,we suggested that the lack of cognitive resources might be the reason why regulatory effects was not observed at the neural level in conscious imagination condition.