Distraction Reduced Negative Emotion Of Methamphetamine Addicts More Effectively: Two ERP Studies Based On Conscious And Automatic Emotion Regulation

Emotion is closely related to our daily life.It is not only involved in individuals' physical and mental health,but also subjective well-being.Especially,negative emotions are significantly important to individuals' survival.However,improperly handling of negative emotions may cause serious consequences such as depression,anxiety,traumatic stress disorder,aggression and violence,which are harmful to mental health and social harmony.And the effective regulation of emotion,especially negative emotion,can improve the individuals' subjective well-being,psychological tolerance,and physical and mental health.There is no doubt that emotion regulation has great significance to people,especially to drug addicts.Previous studies have shown that drug addicts are accompanied with a variety of emotional problems,such as depression,anxiety.And these emotional problems are not only the serious consequences caused by drug addiction,but also the important factors to promote individual to take drugs or relapse.Furthermore,the related researches have shown that drug addiction may have difficulties in emotion regulation.Nevertheless,these were only inferred from Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Questionnaire(DERQ)or researches based on neural mechanism.There were little behavioral researches indicated whether methamphetamine addicts could successfully use specific emotion regulation strategies to modulate negative emotion,and whether the moderate effect differed from emotion regulation strategies.Twenty-five methamphetamine addicts in a short-term abstinence participated in study 1(21 subjects valid).We used block design and divided emotion regulation strategies into viewing negative condition,cognitive reappraisal,expression suppression and distraction.And we employed viewing neutral conditions as a baseline of emotional arousal.In this experiment,high-intensity negative emotional pictures(bloody pictures)were presented and asked subjects to regulate their emotional experience according to different emotional regulation instructions,and recorded EEG data at the same time.The results showed that compared to neutral viewing condition,negative viewing condition significantly induced participants' negative emotional experience,greater P3 amplitude and Late Positive Potential(LPP).Besides,compared with cognitive reappraisal,both expressive suppression and distraction strategies could effectively reduce negative emotional experience and its related LPP amplitude in methamphetamine addicts.And distraction strategy reduced negative emotional experience more effectively than expressive suppression.However,cognitive reappraisal strategy could not only effectively regulate subjects' subjective emotional experience and LPP amplitude,but also caused earlier and larger P2 amplitude.These results showed that methamphetamine addicts were able to successfully use expression suppression and distraction strategies to regulate negative emotions,but they were not able to effectively use cognitive reappraisal strategies.However,cognitive reappraisal is an effective and adaptable emotion regulation strategy,although using it depends on more cognitive resources.As previous studies have shown that addicts may be associated with cognitive deficits or impairments,which may have a great impact on the consequences of using cognitive reappraisal.Therefore,in order to verify the poor effect of cognitive reappraisal strategy was attributed to the lack of cognitive resources.In Study 2,we used automatic emotion regulation based on implementation intentions.The experimental procedures were similar to study 1,but the goal intention condition was added,and the instructions werect modified.Twenty methamphetamine addicts in a short-term abstinence(19 subjects valid)were involved in this experiment,and EEG data were recorded.The results showed that no matter cognitive reappraisal,expression suppression or distraction,even goal intention,all emotion regulation strategies were significantly reduced negative emotion experience.Moreover,distraction significantly reduced LPP amplitude than goal intention and cognitive reappraisal.In study 2,results showed that emotion regulation strategies based on implementation intentions,can effectively reduce the negative emotion experience,decrease resource consumption and influence brought by negative emotion.More importantly,the effect of cognitive reappraisal can be partially restored.But for methamphetamine addiction subjects,distraction strategy was still the best emotion regulation method,expressive suppression came second.It could be associated with the immediate effect of distraction and the habitual use which led by Chinese cultural environment.In conclusion,this study showed that high-intensity negative emotional stimuli can validly induce methamphetamine addicts' negative emotion.And methamphetamine addicts' difficulties in emotion regulation may be unbalanced.They can effectively use expression suppression and distraction but not cognitive reappraisal to modulate negative experience;and although by implementation intention,methamphetamine addicts can effectively use cognitive reappraisal to regulate subjective experience but not neural response.It may be related the long-term change in brain mechanism which caused by drug abusing.In short,their optimal regulation strategy is still distraction.This study suggested that methamphetamine addicts' emotional problems may be associated with inappropriate emotion regulation such as distraction and suppression.Through implementation intention,we can train the adaptable emotion regulation strategies such as cognitive reappraisal,so as to reduce methamphetamine addiction or relapse which induced by emotional problems.