The Influence Of Reward Motivation On Emotion Regulation

The influence of reward on behavior is one of the hottest research subjects in psychological research.More and more researchers begin to explore the effect of reward on cognitive behavior.Numerous studies have shown that reward-induced motivation promotes the performance of the participants.In the field of emotional processing,researchers have paid more attention to the effect of rewards on the processing of individual emotional information,but few have directly discussed the effect of reward-induced motivation on emotional regulation.Emotional regulation is a process in which individuals adopt certain strategies to cognitively regulate their emotions.In many cases,people regulate emotions to reduce their negative emotions or improve their positive emotions,so as to better adapt to the surrounding environment.As a specific form of cognitive control,emotional regulation may also be influenced by rewards.Therefore,this study aims to focus on the effect of reward-induced motivation on the negative emotional regulation and positive emotional regulation of individuals under the stimulation of monetary reward,that is,whether the reward motivation can improve the emotional regulation ability of individuals.This study is divided into study 1 and study 2.Study 1 includes experiment 1a and experiment1 b.Experiment 1a and experiment 1b introduced monetary characters as reward stimulus on the basis of the classic emotion regulation paradigm,respectively exploring the effect of reward on the ability of negative emotion down-regulation and positive emotion up-regulation.The results showed that the subjects could effectively regulate their negative and positive emotions according to the experimental instructions under the conditions of reward and no reward.Importantly,compared with no money reward condition,subjects under money reward condition can better regulate their emotions,that is,they will have lower negative emotional experience and higher positive emotions.However,it is worth noting that as a reward stimulus cue,the value of money itself may trigger positive emotions,that is,in the negative emotional regulation,the positive emotions triggered by money characters in the reward condition offset the negative experience induced by negative picture stimulus,making subjects experience less negative emotions.In the process of positive emotional upgrade,the positive emotions caused by money characters in the reward condition enhanced the positive emotional experience induced by positive picture stimulus,and made the subjects experience more positive emotions.So were the results of experiments 1a and 1b really motivated by reward-induced motivation or by positive emotions triggered by money itself? This required us toseparate the two factors and discuss them separately.Therefore,we carried out study 2 to simply discuss the influence of positive emotion induced by monetary stimulus on individual emotional regulation.Study 2 includes experiment 2,experiment 3a and experiment 3b.In this study,we used money picture stimulation instead of money character stimuli to induce positive emotions.The reason is that in daily life,people are more exposed to money pictures and more sensitive to money pictures.Compared with money characters,money pictures are more intuitive,which may easily trigger certain positive emotions and more convenient to explore the influence of money-induced positive emotions on emotional regulation..We first conducted experiment 2 to verify whether monetary stimulus can trigger positive emotions.Experiment 2 required subjects to evaluated the emotional pleasure degree of money pictures,positive pictures,negative pictures and neutral pictures.It was found that money pictures could induce positive emotions of the subjects as well as positive pictures.Experiment 3a and 3b respectively explored whether the positive emotions induced by money stimulus could affect the emotional regulation effect of the subjects,that is,whether the positive emotions generated by money pictures reduced the negative emotions of the subjects when the negative emotions were down,and whether the positive emotions generated by money pictures enhanced the positive emotions of the subjects when the positive emotions were up.The results showed that the subjects were able to effectively regulate their negative and positive emotions according to the experimental instructions,no matter in the condition of money pictures or no money pictures,and there was no significantdifference in the effect of emotion regulation between the two conditions.Therefore,the results of experiments 3a and 3b ruled out the possibility that purely monetary stimulus pictures could promote the thesubjects' ability of emotion regulation.The results of study 1 preliminarily show that reward can promote the improvement of emotional regulation ability of participants.In study 2,the results of experiment 2 proved that money stimulation can induce positive emotions of individuals.The results of experiment 3a and 3b again confirmed that the simple monetary stimulus could not reduce the negative emotions and enhance the positive emotions of the subjects.It was the reward motivation induced by money that ultimately promoted the improvement of the emotional regulation ability of the subjects.Therefore,in this study,it can be inferred that when money stimuli do not contain a rewarding nature,the positive emotions caused by money do not affect the individual's emotional regulation.Only when the money stimulus and the task show a certain relationship,the money can exert the incentive effect induced by the reward to promote the individual's emotional adjustment ability.Comprehensive analysis: In this study,the improvement of individual's emotional regulation ability was indeeddriven by reward motivation,that is,the motivation induced by reward can effectively promote individual's emotional regulation ability.