The Generalization Of Automatic Emotion Regulation By Implementation Intentions In Unspecified Situations

Implementation intentions(IIs),which specify how to respond in a given situation(e.g.,if I see blood,then I will take a perspective of a physician),are known for its usefulness in automatic regulation of emotion evoked by the specified situations.However,previous studies have focused on the regulation effects of implementation intentions on the specified situation planned in the if-part,leaving it unknown whether the regulatory effects of IIs can be generalized to the unspecified adverse situations.We know from life experience that the situations around us are often unpredictable and cannot be planned in advance.Can the regulation effects of IIs still help to deal with the everchanging environments? Some research showed that automatic goal pursuit is not strictly bound with the preset events.Therefore,this study added the unspecified scenes to explore whether the IIs is specific to the planned scenes or can produce more adaptive generalization on unplanned scenes.Experiment 1 was designed to check out whether the automatic emotional regulation effects of the IIs in bloody scenes can be generalized to unspecified negative scenes,so we selected bloody and non-bloody(disgusting)pictures as specified and unspecified scenes,respectively,with matched valence,arousal and the degree of disgust.Subjects were divided into three emotion regulation condition groups: RII(" I will not get disgusted,and if I see blood,then I will take the perspective of a physician"),GI(“I will not get disgust”)and passively watching group.Each subject was shown pictures of three types: the specified pictures(bloody scenes),the unspecified pictures and the neutral pictures.The results showed that participants in RII group effectively down-regulated their negative emotions under both specified and unspecified stimuli.Since the material selected in Exp.1 was matched in the degree of disgust,which means the specified and unspecified situations are both goal-related situations(disgusting scenes).Exp.2 went further to explore whether the regulation effects of RII can be generalized to goal-unrelated situations.Therefore,we used the frightening pictures as non-bloody stimuli to evoke untargeted emotion.The results showed that the subjects in RII experienced significantly fewer negative feelings under bloody scene,but there were no significant differences among three groups in negative experience under frightening scene.Together with the results of Exp.1,Exp.2 indicated that emotional-regulation effects formed by RII specified to a particular emotional scene can be generalized to unspecified scene,but the generalization effects may have a scope in some degree-it can only work with the goal-related scenario(disgusting situations),but not the goal-unrelated ones(frightening situations).Based on Exp.2,Exp.3 adjusted the RII with wider coverage —— “I will not feel unhappy,if I see the blood,then I will take the perspective of an art designer” to transform the goal-unrelated scenes into the goal-related ones.The results showed that RII with wider coverage can help to significantly reduce the negative experience when watching frightening scene.In Exp.4,intimacy pictures were used as the emotional stimuli that not specified in RII,aiming to explore whether the ability of automatic emotional control formed through RII may have any impact on individuals' emotional experience to positive stimuli.Results showed that RII participants rated bloody pictures as less unpleasant and less arousing than those in GI and control groups,but all three groups experienced the same level of pleasantness and excitement while viewing pleasant pictures,indicating that automatic emotion regulation effects of RII still worked well in bloody situations and did not influence the positive feelings.In addition,in all four experiments,participants in the intention group did not make any more cognitive efforts in emotion regulation.Present study repeated the results of previous studies that IIs can effectively regulate the negative feelings induced by planned adverse situations.And it also proved for the first time that the regulation effects formed by the automatic processing may not lose the adaptability and flexibility to some extent.It can still be applied to deal with the everchanging environments flexibly.But the generalization ability of emotion regulation is limited.Look from the same emotional dimension,the emotion regulation effects on planned situations(blood)formed by IIs can be generalized to adverse situations that evoked the same goal emotion(disgusting),but it cannot be generalized to the situations that evoked the goal-unrelated negative emotions(frightening).From the perspective of different dimensions,the emotional control ability formed by implementation intentions did not affect their pleasant experience of positive stimuli(intimate scenes).In addition,for the scenes that induce different negative emotions,the generalization to the frightening scenes can be significantly improved by widen the coverage of RII,indicating that the goal-relevance of the unspecified scenes may be a key factor in the generalization of implementation intentions under goal-unrelated situations.In general,this study first verified the automatic emotion regulation effects of IIs in the specified scenes.At the same time,we explored whether the emotion regulation effects established for a specific scene can be generalized to the unspecified scenes.This study fills in the theoretical gap in the field of emotional regulation by implementation intentions,and also provides some empirical basis and preparation for how to optimize the implementation intentions in the future.